"Suppose I should stake you for the present, and put you in with a good crowd. All you would have to do would be to answer advertis.e.m.e.nts for servant girls. I will see that you have the best of references. Then, when you get in with the right people, you will open the front door some night and let in the gang. Of course, you will make a get-away when they do, and get your bit as well."

There flashed still another of the swift, sly glances, and the lips of the girl parted as if she would speak. But she did not; only, her head sagged even lower on her breast, and the shrunken form grew yet more shrunken. Mary, watching closely, saw these signs, and in the same instant a change came over her. Where before there had been an underlying suggestion of hardness, there was now a womanly warmth of genuine sympathy.

"It doesn't suit you?" she said, very softly. "Good! I was in hopes it wouldn't. So, here's another plan." Her voice had become very winning.

"Suppose you could go West--some place where you would have a fair chance, with money enough so you could live like a human being till you got a start?"

There came a tensing of the relaxed form, and the head lifted a little so that the girl could look at her questioner. And, this time, the glance, though of the briefest, was less furtive.

"I will give you that chance," Mary said simply, "if you really want it."

That speech was like a current of strength to the wretched girl. She sat suddenly erect, and her words came eagerly.

"Oh, I do!" And now her hungry gaze remained fast on the face of the woman who offered her salvation.

Mary sprang up and moved a step toward the girl who continued to stare at her, fascinated. She was now all wholesome. The memory of her own wrongs surged in her during this moment only to make her more appreciative of the blessedness of seemly life. She was moved to a divine compa.s.sion over this waif for whom she might prove a beneficent providence. There was profound conviction in the emphasis with which she spoke her warning.

"Then I have just one thing to say to you first. If you are going to live straight, start straight, and then go through with it. Do you know what that means?"

"You mean, keep straight all the time?" The girl spoke with a force drawn from the other's strength.

"I mean more than that," Mary went on earnestly. "I mean, forget that you were ever in prison. I don't know what you have done--I don't think I care. But whatever it was, you have paid for it--a pretty big price, too." Into these last words there crept the pathos of one who knew. The sympathy of it stirred the listener to fearful memories.

"I have, I have!" The thin voice broke, wailing.

"Well, then," Mary went on, "just begin all over again, and be sure you stand up for your rights. Don't let them make you pay a second time. Go where no one knows you, and don't tell the first people who are kind to you that you have been crooked. If they think you are straight, why, be it. Then n.o.body will have any right to complain." Her tone grew suddenly pleading. "Will you promise me this?"

"Yes, I promise," came the answer, very gravely, quickened with hope.

"Good!" Mary exclaimed, with a smile of approval. "Wait a minute," she added, and left the room.

"Huh! Pretty soft for some people," Aggie remarked to Garson, with a sniff. She felt no alarm lest she wound the sensibilities of the girl.

She herself had never let delicacy interfere between herself and money.

It was really stranger that the forger, who possessed a more sympathetic nature, did not scruple to speak an a.s.sent openly. Somehow, he felt an inexplicable prejudice against this abject recipient of Mary's bounty, though not for the world would he have checked the generous impulse on the part of the woman he so revered. It was his instinct on her behalf that made him now vaguely uneasy, as if he sensed some malign influence against her there present with them.

Mary returned soon. In her hand she carried a roll of bills. She went to the girl and held out the money. Her voice was business-like now, but very kind.

"Take this. It will pay your fare West, and keep you quite a while if you are careful."

But, without warning, a revulsion seized on the girl. Of a sudden, she shrank again, and turned her head away, and her body trembled.

"I can't take it," she stammered. "I can't! I can't!"

Mary stood silent for a moment from sheer amazement over the change.

When she spoke, her voice had hardened a little. It is not agreeable to have one's beneficence flouted.

"Didn't you come here for help?" she demanded.

"Yes," was the faltering reply, "but--but--I didn't know--it was you!"

The words came with a rush of desperation.

"Then, you have met me before?" Mary said, quietly.

"No, no!" The girl's voice rose shrill.

Aggie spoke her mind with commendable frankness.

"She's lying."

And, once again, Garson agreed. His yes was spoken in a tone of complete certainty. That Mary, too, was of their opinion was shown in her next words.

"So, you have met me before? Where?"

The girl unwittingly made confession in her halting words.

"I--I can't tell you." There was despair in her voice.

"You must." Mary spoke with severity. She felt that this mystery held in it something sinister to herself. "You must," she repeated imperiously.

The girl only crouched lower.

"I can't!" she cried again. She was panting as if in exhaustion.

"Why can't you?" Mary insisted. She had no sympathy now for the girl's distress, merely a great suspicious curiosity.

"Because--because----" The girl could not go on.

Mary's usual shrewdness came to her aid, and she put her next question in a different direction.

"What were you sent up for?" she asked briskly. "Tell me."

It was Garson who broke the silence that followed.

"Come on, now!" he ordered. There was a savage note in his voice under which the girl visibly winced. Mary made a gesture toward him that he should not interfere. Nevertheless, the man's command had in it a threat which the girl could not resist and she answered, though with a reluctance that made the words seem dragged from her by some outside force--as indeed they were.

"For stealing."

"Stealing what?" Mary said.

"Goods."

"Where from?"

A reply came in a breath so low that it was barely audible.

"The Emporium."

In a flash of intuition, the whole truth was revealed to the woman who stood looking down at the cowering creature before her.

"The Emporium!" she repeated. There was a tragedy in the single word.