"Calloway was pretty near to being a gentleman--not a born one, like your papa, dearie, but real genteel in his instincts, and he did a whole lot to make a lady of me. He always insisted on us having the best of everything, company especially. When he knew he had to die, poor boy!"--her lips trembled--"he says to me, says he, 'Here's your chance, old girl! Take the money, and go somewhere and make a fresh start,' he says. 'You'll do! You're good as any of 'em.' His very words, dearie! 'You're good as any of 'em.'"--She wiped her eyes. "And so you came here?" prompted the girl. "Yes. I'd always liked the place. It seemed sort of friendly and homelike, and it's small enough so that your money counts for something. It wouldn't be lost, I thought, like in New York or Chicago--But I was kind of lonesome at first--always been used to having a man around--and I didn't know anybody. And then your mama died, and I saw my way clear. You didn't know I knew your mama, did you, dearie?" Joan was rather startled. She had not realized quite how early her life and her father's had been swept into the stream of this woman's ambition. "Well, I did. Not to speak to, of course. But I used to watch her out of my back windows, and think what a lady she was to be so poor, and wished I knew how to scrape acquaintance with her. And once she caught me watching her, and smiled up, just as sweet, as if she'd known me always and liked me. (Sort of the way _you_ smile, dearie, when you're real pleased.)--And when she died the idea came to me, all of a sudden, that I was the person to look after them she'd left." Suddenly she buried her face in her hands and began to weep again. "Oh, Gawd! Think of where I'd got to, and look where I'm at now!" Joan moved restlessly about the room, conscious of the ache of tears in her own throat. She pictured that child of the streets and dancehalls, poor little "Lightfoot Ef," as they called her, struggling to better her condition, sturdily trying to find some tenable place of her own in life, even as she, Joan, was trying--but under what hopeless handicaps! She thought of the cocaine-drugged mother with ambitions; of the evil, treacherous creature with whom the child had chosen to "take a chance"; and it began to seem almost a miracle that Effie May should be what she was. Joan looked at her with something like respect. "But I heard you tell my father you had buried two husbands!" she said sharply. "If you really felt that you were 'good as any of them,' that--that you had practically been married--why didn't you make a clean breast of it all?" "Because I'm no fool!" gulped Effie May. "There are some things a man won't stand for--though God knows why _they_ should be so all-fired particular! And it seemed the only chance I'd ever get to marry a real gentleman. Besides, there was you." "Me?"