"
"Has she learned that important fact?" asked Mr. Roberts, with a
significant smile. Then some explanation seemed necessary. "This lady,"
he said, "tried the alley alone yesterday, and lost her way, and went
lower down,--quite near to Burk Street, I imagine."
"And what happened?" The quick question and the doctor's tone suggested
possibilities not pleasant.
"Oh, she met one of her new recruits,--as hard a boy, so one of the
policemen on this beat tells me, as there is in the row,--and pressed
him into service to escort her back to civilization; and strange to say,
the fellow did it without placing any tricks."
The doctor turned on the small lady a curious glance.
"I think you may be able to do something, even for Dirk Colson," he
said.
"Do you know him?"
He laughed over the eagerness of the question.
"Never heard of him before. I was only thinking of our friend's
description of his awfulness. Ah, whom have we here?"
For the door had opened abruptly, and a pair of great blue eyes, set in
a frame of tawny hair, all in a frizzle, had peered in on them. The
vision was clothed in garments so torn the wonder was that they stayed
on at all, and there was a general look of abject poverty about her to
which Sallie Calkins, with all the bareness of her lot, was a stranger.
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