“Who are you?”

“I am the doctor, but you mustn’t try to talk,” came the grave reply.

“Where are my children—­my boys and my girl?” Elizabeth Burton’s face suddenly became a face of terror and her eyes dilated.  “Where are my children?” she once more demanded.

“There is no one here just now.”  The doctor spoke as soothingly as he could.  “You mustn’t talk.”

A spark of returned sanity crept into the dying woman’s pupils and she groaned.  “No one here!  I remember,” she said while she shook with a sudden realization.  “I remember—­they’re all gone.”  Her gaze traveled around the squalid room, and realized what that meant, too.  “Am I dying?” she inquired.  The physician murmured something evasive, and from her thin lips broke a low, smothered outcry.  “Yes,” she said, striving to rise and falling back, “I’m dying—­alone—­abandoned—­by myself—­in this attic.”

Then her eyes closed.  The physician bent over the bed with his fingers on the pulse, and then bent his ear to the breast.

“We have nothing more to do here,” he announced briefly, “except to notify her daughter and the coroner.  Have you the young woman’s ’phone number?”

The landlord nodded.

All of these scraps of information were received by Mr. Abey Lewis.  He had taken his place near the ’phone and stood sentinel there.  But when the second communication arrived he procured a pair of clippers from the stage carpenter and quietly cut the connecting wire close to the wall where it would not show.  He was taking no imprudent chances.

* * * * *

Smitherton reached the theater early and stood for a while at the elbow of the ticket-taker, watching the throngs crowd in.  But at the commencement of the performance he went inside and sat near the back of the house.  It was only when he knew that Mary’s act was due in a few minutes that he went behind.  She might want just a word or smile of encouragement at the final moment.

For Mary this had been a morning and afternoon of soul-trying torture and she had been sustained only by the knowledge that she was doing what she was doing not for herself—­but for those helpless ones whom she loved.

As the moment drew nearer, she strained more tightly that elastic and strong thread of courage which had so far held.  As an antidote to the increased loathing she fixed her mind on one supporting thought and tried to hold it focused there.  Tomorrow she could begin looking for better quarters, and then the two old people should return, not to the lavish wealth of former times, but to its more essential comfort.

She heard the orchestra tuning for the overture, and shivered.  She felt much more like a victim waiting her turn to be thrown to the lions than a young woman about to make her debut as a “headliner.”  To herself she kept repeating under her breath, “Tomorrow they will be comfortable again.”  She did not know that already they were comfortable without her assistance and that her ordeal was pitifully wasted.