"She was a beautiful woman. They were always telling her of it again and again, and I used to go and look at myself in the glass and be glad that I was thin and dark and ugly and that they laughed at me. I wanted to be hideous. Once, when I was a child, a man said: 'Never mind, she will be a beauty some day—like her mother!' and I flew at him and struck him, and then I ran away to my room and fell down upon my knees and said the first prayer I ever said in my life. I said, 'O God!—if there is a God—strike me dead! O God!—if there is a God—strike me dead!'"
The woman who listened shuddered.
"Am I like—anybody?" she said next.
"I do not know," was the answer.
"I could not tell myself, if I were," she said. "I have watched for it for so long that I should not see it if it had come. I look every day. Perhaps I am and do not know. Perhaps that is why they look at me in the street, and speak of me loud as I go by."
Her voice fell into a whisper. She threw herself upon her knees and laid her head upon the woman's lap.
"Cover me with your arms," she said. "Cover me so that you may not see my face."
She was constantly moved to these strange outbursts of feeling in these days. A few nights later, as he sat at work after midnight, Murdoch fancied that he heard a sound outside his door. He went to it and opened it and found himself confronting the girl as she sat crouched upon the lowest step of the stairway.
"What are you doing here?" he asked.
"I could not go to sleep," she answered. "I could not stop thinking of what you were doing. It seemed as if I
