A deep emotion was evident in both of them, but its character was different. The woman was stirred to a passionate excitement; her breaths came in deep, catching sobs; her face worked with a nervous strain; and her cheeks flushed hotly under their rouge. The child, on the other hand, was deeply calm and grave. She lay with utter contentment in that bedizened creature’s arms, and looked up at her as trustingly and unquestioningly as though she had been a Madonna. This long, deep, concentrated look was undisturbed, as she said with a wondering seriousness: “Are you my mother?” “No, darling, no,” the dancer said, bending above her with a mother’s tenderness, while the tears ran down her cheeks, making a pitiable daub of black and white and red there. “My mother died,” the child went on, looking only at the gentle eyes of the woman, and speaking in a grave and placid tone. “And my little baby died,” the dancer said. “She would have been as old as you. She died before she ever knew her mother’s face, and my heart has been empty, ever since.” “I love you,” said the child. The strong, spasmodic movement with which the dancer crushed her to her heart, as she said these words, must have been physically painful, but if it was, the child gave no sign, except a radiant smile of joy. There was a look of almost holy calm upon the little pallid face. She put up one small hand, and patted lovingly the smeared face that bent above her. “You are good,” she said. “Am I, darling? Oh, I should like to be! If my little baby had lived perhaps I should have been, though everybody has been bad to me. No one has ever loved me, as you do, before.” “Your little child loves you,” was the quiet answer, still with that look and tone of knowledge. “Oh, do you think she does, and that I will some time have her again?” “Yes,” said the child, with a certainty that seemed to make doubt unreasonable. Then looking around, as if in sudden recollection, she said, “Clem--Boy--come here.” At these words a lingering hope sprang up in Rhodes’s heart. This strange mode of addressing him might enable him to keep his secret still. If he could only get the child away now, and to-morrow contrive some way of accounting for her! With this end in view he came forward, the child turning on him, as he did so, the fond, penetrating look he knew so well. The dancer glanced quickly from one to the other, but it was the child she questioned, and not the man. “Is he your father?” she said. “Yes,” said Clementina. “My mother died when I was very little. He has been so good to me.” But what was the matter with Clementina’s voice, and why was her breath suddenly so short and difficult? Rhodes was conscious of this, even in that moment when he realized that his secret was revealed, and his hopes of the Tarara blasted. She was conscious of it, too, and her face took on a sudden look of terror.