“Ain’t love grand?” Mazie sighed deeply. “If it had been my sweetie, I’d a-fell for that line of Ma Bybee’s about him running off with Nita, but you sure stuck by him! I was in love like that once, when I was a kid. I married him, too, and he run off with the albino girl and took my grouch bag with him. Every damn cent I had! But it sure was sweet before we was married and he was nuts about me.” “Aw, let the kid alone!” Sue slipped from the edge of the berth and yawned widely. “Gawd, I’m sleepy! If the cops don’t catch that Hula hussy I’m going out looking for her myself, and when I get through with her she’ll never shake another grass skirt! C’mon, Mazie. It’s three o’clock in the morning, and we’ve got eighteen shows ahead of us.” “Maybe!” Mazie yawned. “If Pop wasn’t stringing us, we’ll be stranded in this burg. G’night, Sally. G’night, Midge. And say, Sally, even if this Dave boy has blowed and left you flat, you won’t have no trouble copping off another sweetie. Gus was telling us about that New York rube that’s trailing you. Hook up with him and you’ll wear diamonds. Believe me, kid, they ain’t none of ’em worth losing sleep over when you’ve got eighteen shows a day ahead of you. G’night.” When they had gone the midget yanked the green curtains together with comical fierceness, then crawled under the top of the sheet that covered Sally. “I’m going to sleep here with you, Sally,” she said. “I don’t take up much room.” And the woman who was old enough to be Sally’s mother curled her 29-inch body in the curve of Sally’s right arm and laid her tiny cheek, as soft and wrinkled as a worn kid glove, in the hollow of Sally’s firm young neck. But long after the midget was asleep, Sally lay wide-eyed and tense in the dark, her mind a welter of fears and love and doubt. She had pleaded passionately with Pop Bybee for David, fiercely shoving to the dark depths of her mind even the memory of the jealousy which Nita had fiendishly aroused in her heart. But now that she had saved him temporarily by convincing Bybee that the boy could not have taken part in the robbery, doubt began to insinuate its ugly body upward from those dark depths where she had buried it. Did he really love her—a pathetic, immature girl from an orphanage, a girl who had been nothing but a responsibility and a source of dire trouble to him since he had first met and championed her on the Carson farm? Her old feeling of inferiority rose like nausea in her throat. Life in an orphanage is not calculated to give a girl faith in her own beauty and charm. No one, until David’s teasing eyes had rested on her, had thought her beautiful. Had he been only sorry for her, glad of an opportunity to “blow,” to get out of the state where he was wanted on two serious charges? Was he dismayed, too, by the fact that moonlight had tricked him into telling her that he loved her, thus adding the responsibility of her future to the burden of protecting her in this hectic present?