"You give me that money," Beatty said, his face pasty and mean with fury, as he climbed to his feet and stood, slowly dusting off his clothes; "that's all I want out o' you. Hand it over, or I'll go down and phone for a constable, and have you taken to the police station. "Yes--you will!" Daisy challenged. "I suppose you think no person around Toddburn ever reads the city papers and notices what the law does to a fellow that brings a girl sixteen years old to a hotel. Go down and phone for the police, if you feel like it! I know who they'll take back with them when they come, and it won't be me. And I'll tell you something more, Mr. Smart Man: If you're not out of here in the next three minutes or less, _I'll_ phone for the constable. It makes me sick to look at you. I want to go and wash my mouth, too. It'll take a good many washings to make it feel as clean as it did before _you_ touched it. Get away from here!" "Well," Beatty growled, after a moment, as a distant step down the hall portended the coming of one of the hotel staff, probably attracted by the sound of the raised voices and scuffling, "keep the money, then, you blamed nickel's worth o' nothing. I'll get the worth of it out o' you some other way, yet--you watch me! There's goin' to come a time when you'll need me, an' you'd better fasten onto this," he took a card from his pocket and tossed it down on the settee. "Till then, I'll bid you 'good-day'." Therewith--in his intense self-reverence, half-expecting to be called back before he reached the street-door--Mr. Frederick S. Beatty turned on his heel and stalked out. But Daisy did not call him back. Neither, be it said, did she hasten to wash her mouth. As the slam of the door downstairs gave ostentatious notice of Beatty's exit, she moved to the window, watching him up the sidewalk with an odd, half-maternal look. "That call-down may do you some good, Mr. Naughty man," she murmured; "you've had too easy a time with girls--that's what ails you, principally." CHAPTER III. THE MAID AND THE CLERK. "'Usbands are hodd duckies," said a voice, accompanying the pat and shake of one of the cushions on the settee where Beatty and Daisy had been sitting. "So they har." The remark suggested experience, and contained an obvious invitation to confidences. Daisy, her eyes still thoughtful, turned and beheld a hectic sylph, with an insinuating expression and a feather-duster. Hair of an elusive hue was gathered into a cone at the back of her head. At the base of this cone, a piece of white cambric was pinned like a saddle. Frank lengths of mature, brown-stockinged leg, in contour like exclamation-marks, rushed upward, as it were, in hot pursuit of a skirt-hem which they did not succeed in overtaking until it had nearly reached the sylph's knee. She had a long chin, and lips that were pursed, not into a line, but into a kind of mincing rosette.