"I was up there on the bridge," Dan went on, almost apologetically. "I saw you there, but I didn't know it was you. Then when you started down to the water, I sorter thought--" "You oughtn't 'a' stopped me," she wailed. "I been walkin' the streets tryin' to get up my courage all day. I'm sick, I tell you. I want to die." "But it ain't right to die this way. Don't you know it's wicked?" "Good and bad's all the same to me. I'm done for. There ain't a soul in this rotten old town that cares whether I live or die!" Dan flushed painfully. He was much more equal to saving a body than a soul, but he did not flinch from his duty. "God cares," he said. "Like as not He sent me out on the bridge a-purpose to-night to help you. You let me put you on the train, Birdie, and ship you home to your mother." "Never! I ain't goin' home, and I ain't goin' to a hospital. Promise me you won't let 'em take me, Dan!" "All right, all right," he said, with an anxious eye on her shivering form and her blue lips. "Only we got to get under cover somewhere. Do you feel up to walking yet?" "Where'd I walk to?" she demanded bitterly. "I tell you I've got no money and no place to go. I been on the street since yesterday noon." "You can't stay out here all night!" said Dan at his wit's end. "I'll have to get you a room somewhere." "Go ahead and get it. I'll wait here." But Dan mistrusted the look of cunning that leaped into her eyes and the way she glanced from time to time at the oily, black water that curled around the corner of the barge. "I got a room a couple of squares over," he said slowly. "You might come over there 'til you get dried out and rested up a bit." "I don't want to go anywhere. I'm too sick. I don't want to have to see people." "You won't have to. It's a rooming house. The old woman that looks after things has gone by now." It took considerable persuasion to get her on her feet and up the bank. Again and again she refused to go on, declaring that she didn't want to live. But Dan's patience was limitless. Added to his compassion for her, was the half-superstitious belief that he had been appointed by Providence to save her. "It's just around the corner now," he encouraged her. "Can you make it?" She stumbled on blindly, without answering, clinging to his arm and. breathing heavily. "Here we are!" said Dan, turning into a dark entrance, "front room on the left. Steady there!" But even as he opened the door, Birdie swayed forward and would have fallen to the floor, had he not caught her and laid her on the bed. Hastily lighting the lamp on the deal table by the window, he went back to the bed and loosened the neck of her dripping coat and then looked down at her helplessly. Her face, startlingly white in its frame of black hair, showed dark circles under the eyes, and her full lips had lost not only their color, but the innocent curves of childhood as well. Presently she opened her eyes wearily and looked about her.