"Miz Timmins says you folks kin all get out. She won't have you served no breakfast. She don't want none of you here."
"My goodness!" wailed Jennie. "Dispossessed--and without breakfast!"
"Where is the proprietor of this hotel, boy?" Ruth asked.
"You mean Mr. Drovers? He ain't here. Gone to Boston. But that wouldn't make no dif'rence. Suse Timmins is boss."
"Oh, me! Oh, my!" groaned Jennie, to whom the prospect was tragic. Jennie's appetite was never-failing.
The boy slouched away just as Tom and Henri Marchand appeared with Bella between them.
"You poor, dear child!" cried Ruth, running along the hall to meet them.
Bella struggled to escape from the boys. But Tom and Colonel Marchand held her by either hand.
"Easy, young one!" advised Captain Cameron.
"I never meant to do no harm, Miss!" cried Bella. "I--I just wanted to see how I'd look in them clothes. I never do have anything decent to wear."
"Why, my dear, don't mind about that," said Ruth, taking the lathlike girl in her arms. "If you had asked us we would have let you try on the things, I am sure."
"Aunt Suse would near 'bout give me my nevergitovers--and she will yet!"
"No she won't," Ruth reassured her. "Don't be afraid of your aunt any longer."
"That is what I tell her," Tom said warmly.
"Say! You won't put me in no home, will you?" asked Bella, with sudden anxiety.
"She means a charitable institution, poor dear," said Aunt Kate.
"That's it, Missus," Bella said. "I knew a girl that was out of one of them homes. She worked for Mrs. Grubson. She said all the girls wore brown denim uniforms and had their hair slicked back and wasn't allowed even to whisper at table or after they got to bed at night."
"Nothing like that shall happen to you," Ruth declared.
"Where is your father, Bella?" Tom asked.
"I don't know. Last I saw of him he came through here with a medicine show. I didn't tell Aunt Suse, but I ran away at night and went to Broxton to see him. But he said business was poor. He got paid so much a bottle commission on the sales of Chief Henry Red-dog's Bitters. He didn't think the show would keep going much longer."
"You know, they didn't know he was Montague Fitzmaurice, the great Shakespearean actor. Pa often takes such jobs. He ain't lazy like Aunt Suse says. Why, once he took a job as a ballyhoo at a show on the Bowery in Coney Island. But his voice ain't never been what it was since."