Julia had expected to find her mother at home.  Instead the room was empty, but the gas was flaring high, and all about was more than the customary disorder; there were evidences that Emeline had left home in something of a hurry.  The girl searched until she found the explanatory note, and read it with knitted brow.

“I’m going to Santa Rosa on important business, deary,” Emeline had scribbled, “and you’d better go to Min’s for a few days.  I’ll write and leave you know if there is anything in it, otherwise there’s no use getting Min and the girls started talking.  There’s ten dollars in the hairpin box.  With love, Mama.”

“Well, I’d give a good deal to know what struck Em,” said Mrs. Tarbury, for the hundredth time.  It was late in the evening of the same day, and the lady and Julia were in the room shared by Miss Connie Girard and Miss Rose Ransome.  Both the young actresses had previously appeared in a skit at a local vaudeville house, but had come home to prepare for a supper to be given by friends in their own profession, after the theatres had closed.  Each girl had a bureau of her own, hopelessly cluttered and crowded, and over each bureau an unshielded gas jet flared.

“Well, I’m going to know!” Julia added, in a heavy, significant tone.  She had come to feel herself very much abused by her mother’s treatment, and was inclined to entertain ugly suspicions.

“Oh, come now!” Rose Ransome said, scowling at herself in a hand mirror as she carefully rouged her lips.  “Don’t you get any silly notions in your head!”

“No,” Mrs. Tarbury added heavily, as she rocked comfortably to and fro, “no, that ain’t Em.  Em is a cut-up, all right, and she’s a great one for a josh with the boys, but she’s as straight as a string!  You’ll find that she’s got some good reason for this!”

“Well, she’d better have!” Julia said sulkily.  “I’m going out to see my grandmother to-morrow and see if she knows anything!”

But she really gave less thought to her mother than to the stinging memory of Barbara Toland’s generosity and Carter Hazzard’s deception.  She settled down contentedly enough, sharing the room with Connie and Rose, and sharing their secrets, and her visit to old Mrs. Cox was indefinitely postponed.  The girls drifted about together, in and out of theatres, in and out of restaurants and hotels, reading cheap theatrical magazines, talking of nothing but their profession.  The days were long and dull, the evenings feverish; Julia liked it all.  She had no very high ideal of home life; she did not mind the disorder of their room, the jumbled bureau drawers, the chairs and tables strewn with garments, the fly-specked photographs nailed against the walls.  It was a comfortable, irresponsible, diverting existence, at its worst.

Emeline did not write her daughter for nearly two weeks, but Julia was not left in doubt of her mother’s moral and physical safety for that time.  Only two or three days after Emeline’s disappearance Julia was called upon by a flashily dressed, coarse-featured man of perhaps forty who introduced himself—­in a hoarse voice heavy with liquor—­as Dick Palmer.