What a squalid little den it was! How cheap, bald, and petty the whole town seemed of a sudden. Lee Virginia halted and turned. There was only one thing to be done, and that was to make herself known. She retraced her steps, pulled open the broken screen door, and entered the café. It was a low, dingy dining-room filled with the odor of ham and bad coffee. At the tables ten or fifteen men, a motley throng, were busily feeding their voracious jaws, and on her left, behind a showcase filled with cigars, stood her mother, looking old, unkempt, and worried. The changes in her were so great that the girl stood in shocked alarm. At last she raised her veil. "Mother," she said, "don't you know me?" A look of surprise went over the older woman's flabby face--a glow which brought back something of her other self, as she cried: "Why, Lee Virginny, where did you come from?" The boarders stopped chewing and stared in absorbed interest, while Virginia kissed her blowsy mother. "By the Lord, it's little Virginny!" said one old fellow. "It's her daughter." Upon this a mutter of astonishment arose, and the waiter-girls, giggling, marvelling, and envious, paused, their platters in hand, to exchange comment on the new-comer's hat and gown. A cowboy at the washing-sink in the corner suspended his face-polishing and gaped over his shoulder in silent ecstasy. For a full minute, so it seemed, this singular, interesting, absorbed immobility lasted; then a seedy little man rose, and approached the girl. His manner was grotesquely graceful as he said: "We are all glad to greet you home again, Miss Virginia." She gave her hand hesitatingly. "It's Mr. Sifton, isn't it?" "It is," he replied; "the same old ha'penny, only a little more worn--worn, not polished," he added, with a smile. She remembered him then--an Englishman, a remittance man, a "lord," they used to say. His eyes were kind, and his mouth, despite its unshaved stubble of beard, was refined. A harmless little man--his own worst enemy, as the saying goes. Thereupon others of the men came forward to greet her, and though she had some difficulty in recognizing one or two of them (so hardly had the years of her absence used them), she eventually succeeded in placing them all. At length her mother led her through the archway which connected the two shanties, thence along a narrow hall into a small bedroom, into which the western sunset fell. It was a shabby place, but as a refuge from the crowd in the restaurant it was grateful. Lize looked at her daughter critically. "I don't know what I'm going to do with a girl like you.--Why, you're purty--purty as a picture. You were skinny as a child--I'm fair dazed. Great snakes, how you have opened out!--You're the living image of your dad.--What started you back? I told you to stay where you was."