Starting with “A,” she read slowly.

“Is your name Abigail?”

Down through Barbara, Camilla, Deborah, Edith, Faith, she read.

“Flora?” she asked.

The girl seemed to apprehend something, appear less blank.

“Florence?” persisted Constance.

“Oh, yes,” she cried, “that’s it—­that’s my name.”

But as for the last name and the address she was just as hazy as ever.  Still, there was now something different about her.

“Florence—­Florence what?” reiterated Constance patiently.

There was no answer.  But with the continued repetition it seemed as if some depth in her nature had been stirred.  Constance could not help feeling that the girl had really found herself.

She had risen and was facing Constance, both hands pressed to her throbbing temples as if to keep her head from bursting.  Constance had assisted her off with her coat and hat, and now the sartorial wreck of her masses of blonde hair was apparent.

“I suppose,” she cried incoherently, “I’m just one more of the thousands of girls who drop out of sight every year.”

Constance listened in amazement.  As the spell of her influence seemed to calm the overwrought mind of the girl there succeeded a hardness in her tone that was wholly out of keeping with her youth.  There was something that breathed of a past where there should have been nothing but the thought of a future.

“Tell me why,” soothed Constance with an air that invited confidence.

The girl looked up and again passed her hand over her white forehead with its mass of tangled fallen hair.  Somehow Constance felt a tingling sensation of sympathy in her heart.  Impulsively she put out her hand and took the cold moist hand of the girl.

“Because,” she hesitated, struggling now with re-flooding consciousness, “because—­I don’t know.  I thought, perhaps—­” she added, dropping her eyes, “you could—­help me.”

She was speaking rapidly enough now, “I think they have employed detectives to trace me.  One of them is almost up with me.  I’m afraid I can’t slip out of the net again.  And—­I—­I won’t go back to them.  I can’t.  I won’t.”

“Go back to whom?” queried her friend.  “Detectives employed by whom?”

“My folks,” she answered quickly.

Constance was surprised.  Least of all had she expected that.

“Why won’t you go home?” she prompted as the girl seemed about to lapse into a sort of stolid reticence.

“Home?” she repeated bitterly.  “Home?  No one would believe my story.  I couldn’t go home, now.  They have made it impossible for me to go home.  I mean, every newspaper has published my picture.  There were headlines for days, and only by chance I was not recognized.”

She was sobbing now convulsively.  “If they had only let me alone!  I might have gone back, then.  But now—­after the newspapers and the search—­never!  And yet I am going to have revenge some day.  When he least expects it I am going to tell the truth and—­”