Mr. Noral, as we shall call him until better informed, now left the parlor, followed by Dolly. She opens the street door and Mr. Noral goes forth from the house where he has formed the first unholy alliance of his life. When the door was closed on his retreating form, Dolly Smith threw the one hundred dollar note upon the floor and danced around it a gay, voluptuous dance.
"There, there, I am forgetting myself!" So saying she darted into a secret closet in the side of the hallway, quickly stuffed herself into a large pair of pants, put on a vest and a coat, seized a large hat and plunged into the street to follow Noral. The arrangements of the streets in that neighborhood furnished but one outlet from Dolly's house, for some distance, so Dolly had no trouble in pursuing him. Though very corpulent, Dolly was strong and active and by alternately walking and trotting, puffing and blowing, she soon came in sight of Noral, whom she followed at a safe distance, he and she both keeping as much as possible in the dark. Noral took such a course as led him by Erma Wysong's little home. Here he paused and gazed long and lovingly at the little cottage in which Erma lay dreaming of Astral. Dolly was an interested spectator of this night scene which Noral supposed to be enacted only in the sight of the silent stars, sympathizing angels, and an Allwise Creator. Even the callous heart of Dolly Smith was momentarily touched, and she muttered to herself:
"Poor fellow! It is indeed a tragedy of the soul that that young fellow is denied all honorable approach to that girl and must resort to me, vile woman. Ha! Ha! Dolly Smith, the trusted emissary of a love in its original form as pure as any that ever took root in the human heart! Tut, tut, a few more ennobling reflections and I would be a good woman, which thing is manifestly an impossibility."
Noral moved on, reached the fashionable part of the city and, to Dolly's utter amazement, entered the home of occupants well known to her. She recalled the features of her visitor and said:
"I might have known it! I might have known it! Have I struck the right trail at last? If I have, oh, Satan, prince of Evil, I crave your help." Knitting her brows she shook her clinched fist in rage at the house into which the young man had gone. Having done this to her satisfaction, she started home at a rapid pace arriving there in an exhausted condition. As soon as she was sufficiently recovered from her exhaustion to permit it, she danced a wild, joyous sort of dance, uttering a succession of savage like shrieks of delight.
Sleep, the tender nurse in the employ of nature, soon folded Dolly Smith in her arms and lulled her to rest as soothingly as she did the innocent girl Erma, who now became the storm center of the elements. Let us not find fault with nature because she will not become a party to these human strifes of ours. She but follows the behests of the great Unknown, whose ways are past finding out.
CHAPTER IV.
A LADY WHO DID NOT KNOW THAT SHE WAS A LADY.
"Ellen! Ellen! Oh, Ellen! Ellen Sanders!" Ellen Sanders, a belle in Negro society, had just sat down to partake of a 10:30 A. M. breakfast when she heard this call. She arose hastily and rushed to the diningroom door that opened into the yard, and saw Margaret Marston, another Negro society belle, leaning over the fence that separated her home from that of Ellen. Margaret was holding a newspaper in one hand, one arm being thrown over the paling to hold her up, as she was standing with her feet upon the lower railing to which the palings were nailed. The look of her eye, the appearance of her face, the shaking newspaper, and her almost hysterical shrieks for Ellen, all betokened a high degree of excitement.