“That’s Violet Strange.  She will never be the beauty her sister was; but perhaps that’s not to be deplored.  Theresa made a great mess of it.”

“That’s true.  I hear that she and the Signor have been seen lately here in town.  In poverty, of course.  He hadn’t even as much go in him as the ordinary singing-master.”

I suppose I should have hurried away, and left this barbed arrow to rankle where it fell.  But I could not.  I had never learned a word of Theresa’s fate and that word poverty, proving that she was alive and suffering, held me to my place to hear what more they might say of her who for years had been for me an indistinct figure bathed in cruel moonlight.

“I have never approved of Peter Strange’s conduct at that time,” one of the voices now went on.  “He didn’t handle her right.  She had a lovely disposition and would have listened to him had he been more gentle with her.  But it isn’t in him.  I hope this one—­”

I didn’t hear the end of that.  I had no interest in anything they might say about myself.  It was of her I wanted to hear, of her.  Weren’t they going to say anything more about my poor sister?  Yes; it was a topic which interested both and presently I heard: 

“He’ll never do anything for her, no matter what happens; I’ve heard him say so.  And Laura has vowed the same.” (Laura is our aunt.) “Besides, Theresa has a pride of her own quite equal to her father’s.  She wouldn’t take anything from him now.  She’d rather struggle on.  I’m told—­I don’t know how true it is—­that she’s working in a department store; one of the Sixth Avenue ones.  Oh, there’s Mrs. Vandegraff!  Don’t you want to speak to her?”

They moved off, leaving me still gazing with unseeing eyes at the picture before which I stood planted, and saying over and over in monotonous iteration, “One of the department stores in Sixth Avenue!  One of the department stores in Sixth Avenue!”

Which department store?

I meant to find out.

I do not know whether up till then I had had the least consciousness of possessing what is called the detective instinct.  But, at the prospect of this quest, so much like that of the proverbial needle in a haystack, as I did not even know my sister’s married name and something within me forbade my asking it, I experienced an odd sense of elation followed by a certainty of success which in five minutes changed me from an irresponsible girl to a woman with a deliberate purpose in life.

I am not going to write down here all the details of that search.  Some day I may relate them to you, but not now.  I looked first for a beautiful woman, for the straight, slim, and exquisite creature I remembered.  I did not find her.  Then I tried another course.  Her figure might have changed in the ten years which had elapsed; so might her expression.  I would look for a woman with beautiful dark eyes; time could not have altered them.  I had forgotten