“No, she wasn’t your mother,” the showman’s wife conceded with brusque sympathy. “But I can’t see as how it leaves you any worse off than you was before. One thing ought to comfort you—you know it wasn’t your own mother that turned you over to an orphanage and then beat it, leaving no address. Seems like,” she went on briskly, “from what old lady Bangs told me, that Nora Ford had been hired to take you when she was a maid in a swell home in New York, and she had to beat it—that was part of the agreement—so there never would be any scandal on your real mother. She didn’t know whose kid you was—so the old lady says—and when the money orders stopped coming suddenly she didn’t have the least idea how to trace your people. She supposed they was dead—and I do, too. So it looks like you’d better make up your mind to being an orphan—” “But, oh, Mrs. Bybee!” Sally cried piteously, her eyes wide blue pools of misery and shame. “My real mother must have been—bad, or she wouldn’t have been ashamed of having me! Oh, I wish I hadn’t found out!” And she laid her head down on her arms on the card table and burst into tears. “Don’t be a little fool!” Mrs. Bybee admonished her severely. “Reckon it ain’t up to you, Sally Ford, to set yourself up in judgment on your mother, whoever she was.” “But she sent me away,” Sally sobbed brokenly. “She was ashamed of me, and then forgot all about me. Oh, I wish I’d never been born!” “I reckon every kid’s said that a hundred times before she’s old enough to have good sense,” Mrs. Bybee scoffed. “Now, dry up and scoot to the dress tent to put some more make-up on your face. The show goes on. And take it from me, child, you’re better off than a lot of girls that join up with the carnival. You’re young and pretty and you’ve got a boy friend that’d commit murder for you and pret’ near did it, and you’ve got a job that gives you a bed and cakes, and enough loose change to buy yourself some glad rags by the time we hit the Big Town—” “The Big Town?” Sally raised her head, interest dawning unwillingly in her grieving blue eyes. “You mean—New York?” “Sure I mean New York. We go into winter quarters there in November, and if you stick to the show I may be able to land you a job in the chorus. God knows you are pretty enough—just the type to make every six-footer want to fight any other man that looks at you.” “Oh, you’re good to me!” Sally blinked away the last of her tears, which had streaked her brown make-up. “I’ll stick, if the police don’t get me—and David. And,” she paused at the door, her eyes shy and sweet, “thank you so very much for trying to help me find my—my mother.”