wrinkles, and then she turned and walked slowly on along the
deserted street.

The White Moll! She shook her head a little. The attack had not
unnerved her. Why should it? It was simply that the man had not
recognized her at first in the darkness. The White Moll here at
night in one of the loneliest, as well as one of the most vicious
and abandoned, quarters of New York, was as safe and inviolate
as - as - She shook her head again. Her mind did not instantly
suggest a comparison that seemed wholly adequate. The pucker
deepened, but the sensitive, delicately chiseled lips parted now
in a smile. Well, she was safer here than anywhere else in the
world, that was all.

It was the first time that anything like this had happened, and,
for the very reason that it was unprecedented, it seemed to stir
her memory now, and awaken a dormant train of thought. The White
Moll! She remembered the first time she had ever been called by
that name. It took her back almost three years, and since that
time, here in this sordid realm of crime and misery, the name of
Rhoda Gray, her own name, her actual identity, seemed to have
become lost, obliterated in that of the White Moll. A "dip"
had given it to her, and the underworld, quick and trenchant in its
"monikers," had instantly ratified it. There was not a crook or
denizen of crimeland, probably, who did not know the White Moll;
there was, probably, not one to-day who knew, or cared, that she
was Rhoda Gray!

She went on, traversing block after block, entering a less deserted,
though no less unsavory, neighborhood. Here, a saloon flung a