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Then she thought bitterly of the false hopes she had raised in the despairing father of Florence Gibbons. It was maddening.

Several times during the day Constance dropped into the Betsy Ross, without finding any word.

Late that night the buzzer on her door sounded. It was Mrs. Palmer herself, with a letter at last, written on rough paper in pencil with a trembling hand.

Constance almost literally pounced on it.

“Will you tell the lady who was so kind to me that while she was out seeing you at the tea room, there was a call at her door? I didn’t like to open it, but when I asked who was there, a man said it was the steam-fitter she had asked to call about the heat.

“I opened the door. From that moment when I saw his face until I came to myself here I remember nothing. I would write to her, only I don’t know where she lives. One of the bell-boys here is kind enough to smuggle this note out for me addressed to the Betsy Boss.

“Tell her please, that I am at a place in Brooklyn, I think, called Lustgarten’s–she can recognize it because it is at a railroad crossing–steam railroads, not trolleys or elevateds.

“I know you think me crazy, Mrs. Palmer, but the other lady can tell you about it. Oh, it was the same horrible feeling that came over me that night as before. It isn’t a dream; it’s more like a trance. It comes in a second–usually when I am frightened. I suddenly feel nervous and shaky. I can’t tell what is going on around me. I lose my hearing. Part of the time it is as though, I had a paralytic stroke of the tongue. The next day, perhaps, it is gone. But while it lasts it is terrifying. It’s like walking into a new world, with everybody, everything strange about me.”

The note ended with a most pathetic appeal.

Constance was already nervously putting on her hat.

“You are going to go there?” asked Mrs. Palmer.

“If I can locate the place,” she answered.

“Aren’t you afraid?” inquired the other.

Constance did not reply. She ostentatiously slipped a little ivory- handled revolver into her handbag.

“It’s a new one,” she explained finally, “like nothing you ever heard of before, I guess. I bought it only the other day after a friend of mine told me about it.”

Mrs. Palmer was watching her closely.

“You–you are a wonderful woman,” she burst out finally. “It isn’t good business, it isn’t good sense.”

Constance stopped short in her preparations for the search. “What are business and sense compared to the–the life of–“

She checked herself on the very point of revealing the girl’s real name.

“Nothing,” replied Mrs. Palmer. “I had already made up my mind to go with you before I spoke–if you will let me.”

In a moment the two understood each other better than after years of casual acquaintance.

Back and forth through the mazes of streets and car lines of the city across the river the two women traveled, asking veiled questions of every wearer of a uniform, until at last they found such a place as Florence had described in her note.

There, it seemed, had sprung up a little center of vice. While reformers were trying to clamp down tight the “lid” in New York, all the vicious elements were prying it up here. Crushed in one place, they rose again in another.

There was the electric sign–“Lustgarten.” Even a cursory glance told them that it included a saloon on the first floor, with a sort of dance hall and second-rate cabaret. Above that was a hotel. The windows were darkened, with awnings pulled down, even on what must have been in the daytime the shady side.

“Shall we go in? Are you game?” asked Constance of her companion.

“I haven’t gone so far without considering that,” replied Mrs. Palmer, somewhat reproachfully.

Without a word Constance entered the door down the street followed by her companion.