As he looked into her eyes, all sense of the abnormal disappeared. "I have the imagination, Fran," he exclaimed impulsively, "if it is your life."
"In spite of the lions?" she asked, almost sternly.
Abbott rested a hand upon each of her shoulders, and studied her face. The moonlight was lost in the depths of the unfaltering eyes, and there came upon him a surging tide as from the depths of the unknown, sweeping away such artificial barriers as the mind prepares against all great shocks, or surprises.
"You needn't tell me a word," Abbott said, removing his hands. "I know all that one need know; it's written in your face, a story of sweet innocence and brave patience."
"But I want you to know."
"Good!" he replied with a sudden smile. "Tell the story, then; if you were an Odyssey, you couldn't be too long."
"The first thing I remember is waking up to feel the car jerked, or stopped, or started, and Seeing lights flash past the windows— lanterns of the brakemen, or lamps of some town, dancing along the track. The sleeping-car was home—the only home I knew. All night long there was the groaning of the wheels, the letting off of steam, the calls of the men. Bounder Brothers had their private train, and mother and I lived in our Pullman car. I don't know how old I was when I found out that everybody didn't live on wheels,—that most children had homes that didn't move around, with neighbors and relations. After a while I knew that folks stared at us because we were different from others. We were show-people. Then the thing was to look like you didn't know, or didn't care, how much people stared. After that, I found out that I had no father; he'd deserted mother, and her uncle had turned her out of doors for marrying against his wishes, and she'd have starved if it hadn't been for the show-people."
"Dear Fran!" whispered Abbott tenderly.
"Mother had gone to Chicago, hoping for a position in some respectable office, but they didn't want a typewriter who wasn't a stenographer. It was winter—and mother had me—I was so little and bad!…In a cheap lodging-house, mother got to know La Gonizetti, and she persuaded mother to wait with her for the season to open up, then go with Bounder Brothers; they were wintering in Chicago. It was such a kind of life as mother had never dreamed of, but it was more convenient than starving, and she thought it would give her a chance to find father—that traveling, all over the country. La Gonizetti was a lion-tamer, and that's what mother learned, and those two were the only ones who could go inside Samson's cage. The life was awfully hard, but she got to like it, and everybody was kind to us, and money came pouring in, and she was always hoping to run across a clue to my father—and never did."
She paused, but at the pressure of Abbott's sympathetic hand, she went on with renewed courage: