laid her hand upon the woman's shoulder.

"Will you be so good as to tell me, at once, to whom I have the pleasure of speaking, and what business has brought you here?"

The woman turned and looked at her; as she did so, Madge was conscious of a curious sense of discomfort.

She was of medium height, slender build, and apparently between forty and fifty years of age. Her attire was not only shabby, it was tawdry to the last degree. Her garments were a heterogeneous lot; one might safely swear they had none of them been made for the wearer. One and all were shocking examples of outworn finery. The black chip hat which she wore perched on her head, with an indescribable sort of would-be jauntiness, was broken at the brim, and the one-time gorgeous ostrich feathers were crushed and soiled. A once well-cut cape of erstwhile dark blue cloth was about her shoulders. It was faded, stained, and creased. The fur which had been used to adorn the edges was bare and rusty. It had been lined with silk--as she moved her arms one perceived that of the lining there was nothing left but rags and tatters. Her dress, once the latest fashionable freak in some light-hued flimsy silk, had long since been fit for nothing else than cutting into dusters. She wore ancient patent-leather shoes upon her feet, and equally ancient gloves upon her hands--the bare flesh showing through holes in every finger.

If her costume was strange, her face was stranger. It was the face of a woman who had once been beautiful--how long ago, no one who chanced on her haphazard could with any certainty have guessed. It might have been five, ten, fifteen, twenty years ago--and more than that--since hers had been a countenance which charmed even a casual beholder. It was the face of a woman who had been weak or wicked, and maybe both, and who in consequence had been bandied from pillar to post, till this was all that there was left of her. Her big blue eyes were deep set in careworn caverns; her mouth, which had once been small and dainty, was now blurred and pendulous, the mouth of a woman who drank; her cheeks were sunk and hollow as if she had lost every tooth in her head, the cheek-bones gleaming through the yellow skin in sharp and cruel ridges. To crown it all, her hair was dyed--a vivid yellow. Like all the rest of her, the dye was old and worn. It stood in urgent need of a renewal. The roots were grey, they demonstrated their greyness with savage ostentation. Here and there among the yellow there were grey patches too--in some queer way her attempt at juvenesence had made her look older even than she was.

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