It was indeed Pearl, and, as Flick had said, coming like the wind. She
pulled her horse up as she neared the gate and, when she reached it,
stopped him abruptly, slipped down from the saddle, threw the bridle
over the fence paling and ran toward the two men on the porch. Her face
had changed but little since she had left Hanson among the palms. Even
her wild ride had failed to bring back its color, and the curl of her
upper lip still revealed her teeth.

She stood for a moment before them, slashing her skirt with her riding
crop, then she cast it from her and sank down on the porch as if
suddenly exhausted. Bob Flick quickly poured out a glass of her father's
cognac and held it to her lips. She took a sip of it and it seemed to
revive her.

"He thought that I," her voice was hoarse and labored, "he thought that
I was like those other women that he has picked up and got tired of and
left, Selma Le Grand, and Fanny Estrel, and others. I wonder where he
thinks that I've been living that I wouldn't know about them. Fanny
Estrel! I went to see her once in vaudeville, and, before I'd hardly got
my seat, someone next me began to whisper that she used to be one of
Hanson's head-liners and that he was crazy about her once. And there she
was, old, and fat and tired, playing in an ingénue sketch in a cheap
house!" She laughed harshly. "That's what he was offering me," with a
flare of passion, "and I was too green to know it!"

"And he, where is he?" asked her father, speaking more quickly than was
his wont and eyeing her closely.

"Out there, I suppose, I don't care. Oh, no," meeting his eye and
catching his unspoken question. "He's safe enough; don't worry."