Little Nellai, as she was called, was thrown on her own resources from the moment that she could crawl out of the narrow kitchen door into the patch of garden where potatoes grew and eager chickens played the scavenger for odd morsels of food. Her eldest sister was her real mother, and it was she who daily led her little brood of dirty-faced children out into the beech forest which stood in strange silence behind the cottage. The monotonous years slipped by one after another, enlivened only by a death or a birth or a fight, or a very occasional jaunt to the town in one of the farm wagons, perched up on a load of hay or wedged in between sacks of potatoes. Little Nellai's pretty face and fair hair very soon made her a pet of the lady at the big house, and it was from this kind, but mistaken person, from whom she obtained the seeds of discontent which at the early age of sixteen sent her into the town as a "help" in the kitchen of a man who kept a garage. It was from this place, on the main road to London, that Nellie Pope saw life for the first time and became aware of the fact that the world was a larger place than the little village perched up so near the sky, and caught the fever of discovery from the white dust that was left behind by the cars which sped to London one way, and to Oxford the other. During this first year among shops and country louts, Nellie became aware of the fact that her pretty face and fair hair were very valuable assets. They procured her candies and many other little presents. They enabled her to make a choice among the young men with whom to walk out. They won smiles and pleasant words not only from the chauffeurs of the cars which came into her master's garage to be attended to, but also from their owners. Eventually it was one of these--more unscrupulous than most--who, staying for a few days at the "Red Lion," carried Nellie away with him to London, after several surreptitious meetings in the shady lane at the back of the churchyard. There it was that she saw life with very naked eyes, passed quickly from one so-called protector to another, was taken to the United States by one of a troupe of gymnasts, and then deserted. For two years she had been numbered among the night birds who flit out after dark--a member of the oldest profession in the world. There were, however, no moments in her life--hard, terrible and sordid as it was--when she looked back with anything like regret at those heavily thatched cottages which stood among their little gardens on the side of the hills. She could put up with the fatigue, brutality and uncertainty, the gross actuality of her present life, with courage, cheerfulness and even optimism, but the mere thought of the deadly monotony of that peaceful village, where summer followed winter with inexorable routine, made her shudder. The first pretty frock which had been given her by the lady of the big house had begun the work. The