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work!' It was always that, even in the first days. But I come to you on my knees: Juanito, imagine me there!" She sketched a plunging motion of her vast body, arrested it in time by supporting herself on the table, and threw back her head entreatingly, so that Campton caught a glint of the pearls in a crevasse of her quaking throat. He saw that her eyes were red with weeping.

"What can I do? You're in trouble?"

"Oh, such trouble, my heart—such trouble!" She leaned to him, absorbing his hands in her plump muscular grasp. "I must have news of my son; I must! The young man—you saw him that day you came with your wife? Yes—he looked in at the door: beautiful as a god, was he not? That was my son Pepito!" And with a deep breath of pride and anguish she unburdened herself of her tale.

Two or three years after her parting with Campton she had married a clever French barber from the Pyrenees. He had brought her to France, and they had opened a "Beauty Shop" at Biarritz and had prospered. Pepito was born there and soon afterward, alas, her clever husband, declaring that he "hated grease in cooking or in woman" ("and after my Pepito's birth I became as you now see me"), had gone off with the manicure and all their savings. Mme. Olida had had a struggle to bring up her boy; but she had kept on with the Beauty Shop, had made a success of it,