at which she laughed, and on my proposing that we should go for a walk she consented.  She had left the commercial traveler, it came out in conversation, and we went on talking and walking, one idea only in my mind now; could I detain her till dark?  Dolly, who was very pretty indeed, amused herself with me for hours, playing hot and cold, snubbing me one minute, encouraging me with her eyed another.  Hour after hour went and she found this game so entertaining that she accompanied me to the park behind the Botanical Gardens, and it was not until it was too late for me to catch a train home that she gave herself to me.  In fact, we stayed out the whole of that warm summer night.  As the hours went by she told me of her home in London and how she first went wrong.  She had been a good girl till one day on an excursion she drank some rum or gin, which seemingly revived some dormant taint of heritage; when she went home that night she fell flat at her mother’s feet.  Her parents, well-to-do shopkeepers, who had forgiven her several times before, turned her out.  She became one man’s mistress and then another’s.  She began early, and was scarcely 19 now.  She would leave off the drink for a time and try to be respectable.  She loved her father and mother, but she could not help drinking at times.  She spoke cheerfully and laughingly about it all; she was young, strong, good natured, and careless.  We went to sleep for a little while and then wandered in the early morning down toward the cemetery, when she tried to tidy her hair, asking me how I had enjoyed myself and not waiting for an answer.  She was thirsty, she said, and when the public houses opened we went and had a drink.  It was the first time I had seen her drink alcohol,—­at the boarding house she had always been the picture of health and sweetness,—­and I saw a change come over her at once, so that I understood all that she had told me.  The sleepless night may have made it worse, but the look that came into her eyes, and the looseness of the fibres not only of her tell-tale wet mouth, but of every muscle of her face was startling and piteous to see.  She saw my look and laughed, but her laugh was equally piteous to hear, and when she spoke again her voice had changed too, and was equally piteous.  She asked for another.  ‘No, don’t,’ I begged, for the pretty girl I had flattered myself I had passed a summer’s night with that most young men would envy, showed signs of changing, like some siren, into a flabby, blear-eyed boozer.  That hurt my vanity.

“I met her another night and she took, me to her lodgings, and I slept with her all night.  I no longer tried to stop her drinking, but drank with her.  I ceased to treat her with courtesy and gallantry; she noticed it, but only drank the more, drank till she became dirty in her ways, till her good looks vanished.  I left her, too drunk to stand, as some friend, a woman, called on her.

“She came to see me once more,