"The little dear don't understand it all, but she's bright, if unsophisticated, and I could have just hugged her right there on the street for trusting me in comparison to him, as smug and sleek as Father O'Hara, though that's as far as the comparison goes. "I takes the little darling over to the North Side with me to the home of a fine little actor and his wife, who are more for real home than they are for the gay life. And they don't ask no questions, but just take her right in to their hearthside. "Little Madge was too proud for them, though, even if she had been an orphan and allowed herself to be given a home when she was too small to work and didn't know how to beg, much less spurn any charity. "She goes out every day to look for work. She don't find anybody that wants to hire a girl in a made-over alpaca and clodhopper shoes, though her form and figure is something you don't see in them automobiles that whizz up and down on the boulevards. "She tries to get into a show company, being of that temperament and having a real voice, and she has some narrow escapes from bumping up against fake booking agencies that would have sold her into the same kind of a gilded palace of sin Uncle Dave had cooked up for her. "One day, when she's walking on State street, so shoddy that her little bare feet are touching the pavement through the holes in her soles, she sees a big sign and the wigs in the windows of Burnham's hair store. "She goes in there. A clerk steps up to her, kind of smart-like, and she almost bowls him over. She just reached up, pulls out a couple of pins, takes off her hat and down drops a regular Niagara of Titian tinted tresses. "'How much for this?' she asks him. "He just gasps and goes back to tell it all to Mr. Burnham, and that individual comes out and dickers with her right then and there for the purchase of her crown of glory. "She got sixteen dollars an ounce--a big, fat bank roll. She reinvests some of it for enough false hair to make her look all right and then she goes over to one of the big stores and buys the kind of clothes that nobody knows how to wear like her. "It's the most stunning little beauty in the world that comes home that night. With her clothes and her beauty she don't have no trouble at all to make an engagement. Those two maiden aunts are living in a little bungalow that she's built for them out in a suburb of Chicago today; and me--I'm on the job right here just as you see me. "Uncle Dave? He turned up--not so many days ago. And he has the pneumogastric to try to chuckle her under the chin just like he used to in Springfield. And she don't say a word. "She just turns white as a bit of powdered chalk. I catches her as she keels over. I holds her with one hand. With the other I sticks a hatpin into Uncle Dave where it will do the most good." CHAPTER IV. THE TRAGEDY OF THE IMMIGRANT GIRL.