He threw open the rear doors and surveyed the swollen and tear-streaked features of ’Missy Mayo. She met his gaze for a moment only, and then began to sob again. “Ashamed of yourself, ain’t you?” the showman demanded. She bobbed woful assent with her head and crooked her arm before her face. “Women,” pursued Hiram, relentlessly, “are ostriches when they ain’t wild-cats, and from me that knows ’em all and that’s been scratched criss-cross by wild-cats and has owned ostriches and had a nat’rally sweet and affectionate disposition soured by women’s actions, you can take that say-so as gospel. It ain’t no advance agent’s talk. I’ve been with the main show, and I _know_. You’re an ostrich. Take your head out from under the chip and look at me.” She obeyed, huddling herself on her knees on the blankets. “I know just what you are goin’ to tell me if I begin to ask you questions,” he said. “You’ll take on like a kitten with her tail in a crack and tell me you are so, _so_ sorry and that you’ll never do it again, and that he promised you nice dresses and di’mond rings and nothin’ to do except to let your poor, dear, oopsy-soopsy little hands grow white, and so you couldn’t help yourself, and you tried to be good and love your husband and stay at home, and you couldn’t, so there!” “But I do love my husband,” she sobbed. “And that man did say all those things to me, and he did say I had broken up my husband’s home with his people and that they all hated me, and that my poor Wat would be better off if I were to go away.” “And so you thought it all over and cried off by yourself and planned how noble it would be for you to leave him to be happy ever after, with his folks boarding him, and you would go away into the wide, wide world and sacrifice yourself just as that wife did that you’d read about who went backward outdoors into the night with her black hood on--they allus wear black hoods--waving her hands and sending back kisses toward the bedroom where her husband was sleepin’, and sayin’, ‘Farewell, I go to save thee!’ That was jest the whole story, wa’n’t it?” “Oh, Mr. Look,” began the girl, eagerly, “that was the truth of it--you do know it all--you can appreciate----”