With a little gesture of despairful resignation Miss Smith laid the letter down. Well, there was nothing more she could do; nothing more to be done. She had come to a blind end. The proof was conclusive of the worst. But in her thoughts, waking and sleeping, persisted the image of that gallant, pathetic little figure which she had seen last at the Peekskill station, bound, helpless, alone and all so courageously facing what to most of us would be worse than death itself. Awake or in sleep she could not get it out of her mind.

At length one night following on a day which for the greater part she had spent in a study of the somewhat curious laws that in New York State--as well as in divers other states of the Union--govern the procedure touching certain cla.s.ses coming within purview of the code, she awoke in the little hours preceding the dawn to find herself saying aloud: "There's something wrong--there must be--there has to be!"

Until daylight and after she lay there planning a course of action until finally she had it completed. True, it was a grasping at feeble straws, but even so she meant to follow along the only course which seemed open to her.

First she did some long-distance telephoning. Then immediately after breakfast she sent to the garage round the corner for her runabout and in it she rode up through the city and on into Westchester, now beginning to flaunt the circus colors of a gorgeous Indian summer. An hour and a half of steady driving brought her to the village of Pleasantdale. She found it a place well named, seeing that it was tucked down in a cove among the hills between the Hudson on the one side and the Sound on the other.

Following the directions given her by a lone policeman on duty in the tiny public square, she ran two blocks along the main street and drew up where a window sign giving name and hours advertised that James P.

McGlore, M.D., here professionally received patients in his office on the lower floor of his place of residence. A maidservant answered the caller's knock, and showing her into a chamber furnished like a parlor which had started out to be a reception room and then had tried--too late--to change back again into a parlor, bade her wait. She did not have long to wait. Almost immediately an inner door opened and in the opening appeared the short and blocky figure of a somewhat elderly, old-fashioned-looking man with a square homely face--a face which instantly she cla.s.sified as belonging to a rather stupid, very dogmatic and utterly honest man. He had outjutting, belligerent eyebrows and a stubborn underjaw that was badly undershot. He spoke as he entered and his tone was noticeably not cordial.

"The girl tells me your name is Smith. I suppose from that you're the young person that the district attorney telephoned me about an hour or so ago. Well, how can I serve you?"

"Perhaps, doctor, the district attorney told you I had interested myself in the case of the Vinsolving girl--Margaret Vinsolving," she began. "I had intended to call also upon your a.s.sociate, Doctor Malt, over at Wincorah, but I learn he is away."

"Yes, yes," he said with a sort of hurried petulance. "Know all about that. Malt's like a lot of these young new physicians--always running off on vacations. Mustn't hold me responsible for his absences. Got no time to think about the other fellow. Own affairs are enough--keep me busy. Well, go on, why don't you? You were speaking of the Vinsolving girl. Well, what of her?"

"I was saying that I had interested myself in her case and--"

He snapped in: "One moment. Let's get this all straightened out before we start. May I inquire if you are closely related to the young person in question?"

"I am not. I never saw her but once."

"Are you by any chance a close friend of the young woman?"

He towered over her, for she was seated and he had not offered to sit down. Indeed throughout the interview he remained standing.

Looking up at him, where he glowered above her, she answered back promptly:

"As I was saying, I never saw her but once--that was on the day she was carried away to be placed in confinement. So I cannot call myself her friend exactly, though I would like to be her friend. It was because of the sympathy which her position--and I might add, her personality--roused in me that I have taken the liberty of coming here to see you about her."

Under his breath he growled and grunted and puffed certain sounds. She caught the purport of at least two of the words.

"Pardon me, doctor," she said briskly, "but I am not an amateur philanthropist. I trust I'm not an amateur anything. I am a business woman earning my own living by my own labors and I pay taxes and for the past year or so I have been a citizen and a voter. Please do not regard me merely as an officious meddler--a busybody with nothing to do except to mind other people's affairs. It was quite by chance that I came upon this poor child and learned something of her unhappy state."

The choleric brows went up like twin stress marks accenting unspoken skepticism.

"A child--of twenty-four?" he commented ironically.

"A child, measured by my age or yours. As I told you, I met her quite accidentally. She appealed to me so--such a plucky, helpless, friendless little thing she seemed with those hideous leather straps binding her."

"Do you mean to imply that she was being mistreated by those who had her in charge?"

"No, her escorts--or attendants or warders or guards or whatever one might call them--seemed kindly enough, according to their lights. But she was so quiet, so pa.s.sive that I--"

"Well, would you expect anyone who felt a proper sense of responsibility to suffer dangerous maniacs to run at large without restraint or control of any sort upon their limbs and their actions?"

"But, doctor, that is just the point--are you so entirely sure that she is a dangerous maniac? That is what I want to ask you--whether there isn't a possibility, however remote, that a mistake may conceivably have been made? Please don't misunderstand me," she interjected quickly, seeing how he--already stiff and bristly--had at her words stiffened and bristled still more. "I do not mean to intimate that anything unethical has been done. In fact I am quite sure that everything has been quite ethical. And I am not questioning your professional standing or decrying your abilities.

"But as I understand it, neither you nor Doctor Malt is avowedly an alienist. I a.s.sume that neither of you has ever specialized in nervous or mental disorders. Such being the case, don't you agree with me--this idea has just occurred to me--that if an alienist, a man especially versed in these things rather than a general pract.i.tioner, however experienced and competent, were called in even now--"

"And you just said you were not reflecting upon my professional abilities!"

His tone was heavily sarcastic.

"Of course I am not! I beg your pardon if my poor choice of language has conveyed any such impression. What I am trying to get at, doctor, in my inexpert way, is that I talked with this girl, and while I exchanged only a few words with her, nevertheless what she said--yes, and her bearing as well, her look, everything about her--impressed me as being entirely rational."

He fixed her with a hostile glare and at her he aimed a blunt gimlet of a forefinger.

"Are you quite sure you are entirely sane yourself?"

"I trust I am fairly normal."

"Got any little funny quirks in your brain? Any little temperamental crotchets in which you differ from the run of people round you? Think now!"

"Well," she confessed, "I don't like cats--I hate cats. And I don't like figured wall paper. And I don't like--"

"That will be sufficient. Take the first point: You hate cats. On that count alone any confirmed cat lover would regard you as being as crazy as a March hare. But until you start going round trying to kill other people's cats or trying to kill other people who own cats there's probably no danger that anyone will prefer charges of lunacy against you and have you locked up."

She smiled a little in spite of her earnestness.

"Perhaps it is symptomatic of a lesion in my brain that I should be concerning myself in the case of a strange girl whom I have seen but once--is that also in your thoughts, Doctor McGlore?"

"We'll waive that," he said. "For the sake of argument we'll concede that your indicative peculiarities a.s.sume a harmless phase at present.

But this Vinsolving girl's case is different--hers were not harmless.

Her acts were amply conclusive to establish proof of her mental condition."

"From the district attorney's statement to me I rather got the impression that she did not indulge in any abnormal conduct while before you for examination."

"Did he tell you of her blank refusal to answer the simplest of the questions my a.s.sociate and I put to her?"

"Doctor," she countered, seeking to woo him into a better humor, "would you construe silence on a woman's part as necessarily a mark of insanity? It is a rare thing, I concede. But might it not sometimes be an admirable thing as well?"

But this gruff old man was not to be cajoled into pleasanter channels than the course his mood steered for him.

"We'll waive that too. Anyhow, the mother's evidence was enough."

"But was there anything else other than the mother's unsupported story for you to go on and be guided by?"

"What else was needed?" he retorted angrily. "What motive could the mother have except the motives that were prompted by mother love? That was a devoted, desolated woman if ever I saw one. Look here! A daughter without cause suddenly turns upon her mother and tries to kill her.

Well, then, either she's turned criminal or she has gone crazy!

"But why should I go on debating with you a matter which you don't know anything about in the first place and in which you have no call to interfere in the second place?

"I don't want to be sharp with you, young woman, but that's the plain fact. The duty which I undertook under the law and as a reputable physician was not a pleasant one, and it becomes all the less pleasant when an unqualified layman--laywoman if you prefer to phrase it that way--cross-examines me on my judgment."

"Doctor, let me repeat again I have not sought to cross-question you or belittle your knowledge. But you speak of the law. Do you not think it a monstrous thing that two men even though they be of high standing in their profession as general pract.i.tioners, but without special acquaintance with mental derangements--I am not speaking of this particular case now but of hundreds of other cases--do you not think it a wrong thing that two such persons may pa.s.s upon a third person's sanity and upon the uncorroborated testimony of some fourth person recommend the confinement of the accused third person in an asylum for the insane?"

"I suppose you know a person so complained of--or accused, as you put it--has the right to a jury trial in open court. This girl that you're so worked up about had that right. She waived it."