"Who is her mother?"

The woman looked at the sleeping child and then up at him almost
defiantly. "Ida Clare was her mother," she said.

Van Bibber's protecting hand left the child as suddenly as though
something had burned it, and he drew back so quickly that her head
slipped from his arm, and she awoke and raised her eyes and looked up
at him questioningly. He looked back at her with a glance of the
strangest concern and of the deepest pity. Then he stooped and drew
her towards him very tenderly, put her head back in the corner of his
arm, and watched her in silence while she smiled drowsily and went to
sleep again.

"And who takes care of her now?" he asked.

The woman straightened herself and seemed relieved. She saw that the
stranger had recognized the child's pedigree and knew her story, and
that he was not going to comment on it. "I do," she said. "After the
divorce Ida came to me," she said, speaking more freely. "I used to be
in her company when she was doing 'Aladdin,' and then when I left the
stage and started to keep an actors' boarding-house, she came to me.
She lived on with us a year, until she died, and she made me the
guardian of the child. I train children for the stage, you know, me
and my sister, Ada Dyer; you've heard of her, I guess. The courts pay
us for her keep, but it isn't much, and I'm expecting to get what I
spent on her from what she makes on the stage. Two of them other
children are my pupils; but they can't touch Madie. She is a better
dancer an' singer than any of them. If it hadn't been for the Society