“What a dire threat!” the New Yorker laughed with genuine amusement. “Am I the rube? Is that your idea of a taunt so crushing that—” “It means,” Sally said with cold fury, “that every man connected with the carnival will rush into this tent and—and simply tear you to pieces! It’s the S O S signal of the circus and carnival, and it always works! Now—will you let me go? I swear I’ll scream ‘Hey, rube!’ if you don’t—” “And I had planned such a delicious supper,” the New Yorker mourned mockingly as he slowly released her arm, as if reluctant to forego the pleasure that rounded slimness and smoothness gave his highly educated fingers. Sally cried a little in the dress tent, but she was too angry to give way utterly to tears. The thought which stung her pride most hurtingly was that the New Yorker had seen something bad in her eyes, something of the mother of whose shame she was a living witness. “But—I guess I showed him!” she told herself fiercely as she dabbed fresh brown powder on her tear-streaked face. “He won’t dare bother me again.” But he did dare. He was a nonchalant, smiling, insolent figure, leaning on his cane, as she went through the next performance. She pretended not to see him, but never for a moment, as she well knew, did his cold black eyes waver from their ironic but admiring contemplation of her enchanting little figure in purple satin trousers and green jacket. And at the late afternoon performance—four o’clock—he was there again, his fine, cruel, humorous mouth smiling at his own folly. She thought of appealing to Gus, the barker, to forbid him admission to the tent, but she knew Gus was too good a business man to heed such a wasteful request. Besides, the barker seemed to like him, or at least to like immensely the bill which invariably passed hands when the showman and the glorified “rube” met. Then suddenly, at ten minutes after four, the New Yorker ceased to have any significance at all to her, at least for the moment. He was wiped out completely in the flood of terror and joy that swept over her brain, making her so dizzy that she leaned against the crystal stand for support. For tumbling into the tent of the Palace of Wonders came a horde of children, boys and girls, the girls dressed exactly alike in skimpy little white lawn dresses trimmed with five-cent lace, the boys in ugly suits of stiff “jeans.” Her playmates from the orphanage had come to see “Princess Lalla,” lately Sally Ford, ward of the state and now fugitive from “justice.” CHAPTER X Sally’s first impulse, when she saw the children of the orphanage come tumbling into the Palace of Wonders tent, was to flee. She was so conscious of being Sally Ford, whose rightful place was with those staring, shy little girls in white lawn “Sunday” dresses, that she completely forgot for one moment of pure terror that to them she would merely be “Princess Lalla,” favorite crystal-gazer to the Sultan of Turkey before she escaped from his harem.