“It is worse than the usual mining-camp, or it was when I saw it. It is the only place where the workmen can go to spend their pay, and you know what that would mean.” “I can visualize it pretty well; whiskey, dance-halls and gambling dens, and all that.” “Yes. We saw little of it at the hotel; the Inn is quite a distance from the town and on the other side of the river. But once I went there with--with a man. I didn’t know where he was taking me--or us; there was a party of us from the hotel, you know; slummers, you’d call us.” “I don’t know the man, but he ought to have been murdered,” said David. “Something like that, yes,” she said. “But that wasn’t what I meant to speak about particularly. One of the places where he tried to take us--only we wouldn’t go in--was a dance-hall. There was a girl at the piano; I could see her from where I was standing on the sidewalk. She was beautiful, David, and it made my heart ache to see her in such a place.” “You should never have seen her,” said David hotly. “I’ve been trying to imagine the kind of man who would take you to such a place as that!” “He isn’t worth imagining,” she asserted quietly. “But I was speaking of the girl. She was playing for the dancers, you know, and just in the little minute that we were standing there, a big quarryman broke out of the circle and--and put his arm around her neck. It was horrible. She fought like a tiger, but the man was too strong for her. He struck her ... with his fist.” David shook his head. “Why are you making yourself remember all this? It’s just painful, and it can’t do any good. It was a shame that you had to see it.” “That is foolish,” she reproved gravely. “We are not living in the Victorian age, David, and the shame wasn’t in my seeing it. The dancing stopped, of course, and the men in our party, or some of them, rushed in and interfered. The girl was carried out; the brute’s blow had knocked her senseless. She was taken home and we did what we could for her. The next day I went to see her.” “That was like you, Virginia, only----” “Only what?” “I won’t say that you ought not to have done it; you know best about that; but----” “I had to go, David. There was a--a sort of obligation, you know. She was one of our Middleboro girls. I didn’t know her, but I remembered seeing her as a little thing. Perhaps you knew her; her name is Judith Fallon.” If a bomb had been suddenly exploded under David Vallory he could scarcely have been more completely unnerved and shaken. They were sitting in a window alcove a little apart from the bridge players, and the looped-back curtains dimmed the lights in some measure--for which he was thankful. But Virginia Grillage seemed not to have noticed his gasping start at the mention of Judith’s name, and she went on soberly.