dozed, and wondered moodily what so many nice men saw in his sisters
to make them want to talk to them. It was midnight, and just as he had
tumbled into bed, when the nature of his original engagement came back
to him, and his anger and disappointment were so intense that he
kicked the clothes over the foot of his bedstead.

As for Van Bibber, he knew his friend too well to wait for him, and
occupied a box at the People's Theatre in solitary state, and from its
depths gurgled with delight whenever the Boy Actor escaped being run
over by a real locomotive, or in turn rescued the stout heroine from
six red shirted cowboys. There were quite as many sudden deaths and
lofty sentiments as he had expected, and he left the theatre with the
pleased satisfaction of an evening well spent and with a pitying
sympathy for Travers who had missed it. The night was pleasant and
filled with the softness of early spring, and Van Bibber turned down
the Bowery with a cigar between his teeth and no determined purpose
except the one that he did not intend to go to bed. The streets were
still crowded, and the lights showed the many types of this "Thieves'
Highway" with which Van Bibber, in his many excursions in search of
mild adventure, had become familiar. They were so familiar that the
unfamiliarity of the hurrying figure of a girl of his own class who
passed in front of him down Grand Street brought him, abruptly
wondering, to a halt. She had passed directly under an electric light,
and her dress, and walk, and bearing he seemed to recognize, but as
belonging to another place. What a girl, well-born and well-dressed,
could be doing at such an hour in such a neighborhood aroused his
curiosity; but it was rather with a feeling of _noblesse oblige_, and
a hope of being of use to one of his own people, that he crossed to
the opposite side of the street and followed her. She was evidently
going somewhere; that was written in every movement of her regular