“Well, I do say!” she said; and Maurice, pausing at the voice in the dark, began a brief, “Excuse me; I stumbled—­” saw who it was, and said, “Why, Miss Lily!  How are you?  I haven’t seen you for an age!”

She answered with some small jocosity; then suddenly struck her little fist on the railing.  “Well, I’m just miserable; that’s how I am, if you want to know!  Batty—­”

Maurice frowned.  “Has that pup hurt you?”

She nodded:  “I don’t know why I put up with him!”

“Shake him!” he advised, good-naturedly.

“I ’ain’t got any other friend.”  She spoke with half-laughing anger; indeed, she was so pretty and so plucky that he forgot, for a moment, the irritation at Eleanor which had driven him out into the night, and it came into his mind that something ought to be done for girls like this.  He remembered that Eleanor herself had said so, “Perhaps I could do something for her?” Eleanor had said.

“She isn’t bad,” he thought, looking at Lily; “she’s just a fool, like all of ’em.  But there ought to be some way of fishing ’em out of the gutter, before they get to the very bottom.  Maybe Eleanor could give her a hand up?” Then he asked her about herself:  Had she friends?  Where did her family live?  Could she do any work?  He was rather diverted by his own philanthropy, but it seemed to him that it would be the decent thing to advise the girl, seriously.  “I’ll talk to her,” he thought.  “Come on!” he said; “let’s hunt up some place and have something to eat.”

“I ain’t hungry,” she said—­then saw the careless straightforwardness of his face, and was straightforward herself:  “I guess I’d better be going home.”

“Oh, come on,” he urged her.

She yielded, with a little rollicking chuckle; and as they walked toward a part of town more suitable for such excursions, she confided to him she was twenty, and she’d been “around” for a year.

("Twenty-five, if she’s a day,” he thought.)

They strolled along for several blocks before discovering, in the purlieus of Tyler Street, a dingy “ice-cream parlor,” eminently fitted for interviews with the Lilys of the locality.  At a marble-topped table, translucent with years of ice-cream rendezvous, they waited for his order to be filled, and she saw the amused honesty of his face and he saw the good nature of hers; which made him think again of Eleanor’s wish to help her.

He urged some indifferent cake upon her, and joked about how many saucers of ice cream they could consume between them; then he became serious:  Why didn’t she drop Batty?

“Oh,” she said, “if I only could drop him!  I hate him.  He’s the first friend I’ve had.”

“Was he really the—­the first?” Maurice said.  His question was the old human interest of playing with fire, but he supposed that it was a desire to raise the fallen.

“Well, except ... there was a man; I expected to marry him.  Then Batty, he come along.”