It only took a minute, but in that minute--in that minute, Mag, I had the rose diamond clutched safe in my fingers; I was on the top of the big trunk and out of the window. Oh, the feel of that beautiful thing in my hand! I'd 'a' loved it if it hadn't been worth a penny, but as it was I adored it. I slipped the chain under my collar, and the diamond slid down my neck, and I felt its kiss on my skin. I flew down the black corridor, bumping into scenery and nearly tripping two stage carpenters. I heard Ginger, the call-boy, ahead of me and dodged behind some properties just in time. He went whistling past and I got to the stage door. I pulled it open tenderly, cautiously, and turned to shut it after me. And-- And something held it open in spite of me. No--no, Mag, it wasn't a man. It was a memory. It rose up there and hit me right over the heart--the memory of Nancy Olden's happiness the first time she'd come in this very door, feeling that she actually had a right to use a stage: entrance, feeling that she belonged, she--Nancy--to this wonderland of the stage! You must never tell Tom, Mag, promise! He wouldn't see. He couldn't understand. I couldn't make him know what I felt any more than I'd dare tell him what I did. I shut the door. But not behind me. I shut it on the street and--Mag, I shut for ever another door, too; the old door that opens out on Crooked Street. With my hand on my heart, that was beating as though it would burst, I flew back again through the black corridor, through the wings and out to Obermuller's office. With both my hands I ripped open the neck of my dress, and, pulling the chain with that great diamond hanging to it, I broke it with a tug, and threw the whole thing down on the desk in front of him. "For God's sake!" I yelled. "Don't make it so easy for me to steal!" I don't know what happened for a minute. I could see his face change half a dozen ways in as many seconds. He took it up in his fingers at last. It swung there at the end of the slender little broken chain like a great drop of shining water, blushing and sparkling and trembling. His hands trembled, too, and he looked up at last from the diamond to my face. "It's worth at least fifty thousand, you know--valued at that." I didn't answer. He got up and came over to where I had thrown myself on a bench. "What's the matter, Olden? Don't I pay you enough?" "I want to see Tom," I begged. "It's so long since he--He's up at--at--in the country." "Sing Sing?" I nodded. "You poor little devil!" That finished me. I'm not used to being pitied. I sobbed and sobbed as though some dam had broken inside of me. You see, Mag, I knew in that minute that I'd been afraid, deathly afraid of Fred Obermuller's face, when it's scornful and sarcastic, and of his voice, when it cuts the flesh of self-conceit off your very bones. And the contrast--well, it was too much for me. But something came quick to sober me.