“I didn’t know you cared for children—­”

Adoree shrugged; the beads at her throat clicked barbarously.  “Neither did I, but I suppose every woman does if she only knew it.  To-night I began to understand what this ache inside of me means.”  Her gaze came back and centered upon his face, but it was frightened and panic-stricken now.  “I’ve sacrificed my right to children.”

“How can you say—­”

“Oh, you know it as well as I do!” A flush wavered in the speaker’s cheeks, then fled, leaving her white and weary.  “You, of all men, must understand.  I’m notorious.  I’m a painted woman, a wicked woman—­the wickedest woman in the land—­and that reputation will live in spite of anything I can do.”  She began to cry now in a way strange to Pope’s experience, for her tears appeared, grew, and spilled themselves slowly down her cheeks, and she made no attempt to hide them.  The sight depressed him dreadfully, for at heart he was intensely sentimental.  “I didn’t know what it means to be notorious,” she stated, tensely.  “I didn’t know what I was doing when I agreed to be ‘Adoree Demorest.’”

Pope’s habitual restraint all at once gave way.  “Nonsense!” he exploded.  “The thing that counts is what you are, not what you seem to be.  I know the truth; I don’t give a damn what people say.”

Now there was nothing sufficiently significant about these words to bring a light of wonderment and gladness to the girl’s face, but her tears ceased as abruptly as they had commenced, and, noting the slowly growing radiance of her expression, Campbell was stricken dumb with fright at the possible consequences of temerity.  The knowledge of his shortcomings robbed him of confidence and helped to confuse him.

Adoree rose, she removed her tango cap and the mantle elaborately draped from one shoulder that served as an evening wrap, then with a lingering backward glance she disappeared into her chamber.  She bathed her eyes, powdered her cheeks, patted her hair into more becoming fashion, gave a final dab of the puff upon her nose, as an expert billiard-player chalks his cue.  When she had quite finished she returned to the critic, who meanwhile had remained frozen in his tracks.  For a moment she stood looking up at him with a peculiar, tender smile, then took him by the lapels of his shapeless coat and drew his thin face down to hers.

“I’m not going to let you back out,” she declared, firmly.  “You asked me, didn’t you?”

“Adoree!  No, no!  Think what you are doing,” he cried, sharply.

But she continued to smile up into his eyes with a gladness that intoxicated him.

She snuggled closer to him, murmuring, cozily “I don’t want to think—­we’ll have plenty of time to think when we’re too old to talk.  Now, I just want to love you as hard as you have been loving me for the last six months.”