The daughters, having impressively told their mother that she could come to live with them whenever she “was willing to come alone,” dropped the entire situation. In doing this, they were doubtless instinctively responding to a habit acquired through years of “keeping clear of the queer people father knew in the circus and the saloon crowds always hanging around Tommy,” in their secret hope to come to know respectable young men. Conscious that they had back of them the opinion of all righteous people they could not understand why their mother, for the sake of a bad girl, had deserted them in this praiseworthy effort in which hitherto she had been the prime mover. Tommy had sent his “girl” to his mother on the eve of his departure for “a grand tour to the Klondike region,” and since then, almost four years ago, she has heard nothing further from him. During the first half of the time the two women struggled on together as best they could, supporting themselves and the child who was brought daily to the nursery by his grandmother. But the pretty little mother, gradually going back to her old occupation of dancing in the vaudeville, had more and more out-of-town engagements, and while she always divided her earnings with the baby, the grandmother suspected her of losing interest in him, a situation which was finally explained when she confessed that she was about to be married to a cabaret manager who “knew nothing of the past,” and to beg that the baby might stay where he was. “Of course, I will pay board for him, but his father can be made to do something, too, if we can only get the law on him.”