But his well-meant attempt to a.s.suage the stricken creature's wo was futile. The sobbing continued. With it came a plaintive cry, many times repeated, softly, but very miserably.

"Oh, dear! Oh, dear!"

"Isn't there something else you can tell me about this woman?" Burke inquired in desperation before the plaintive outburst. He hoped to distract her from such grief over her predicament.

The girl gave no least heed to the question.

"Oh, I'm so frightened!" she gasped.

"Tut, tut!" the Inspector chided. "Now, I tell you there's nothing at all for you to be afraid of."

"I'm afraid!" the girl a.s.serted dismally. "I'm afraid you will--put me--in a cell!" Her voice sank to a murmur hardly audible as she spoke the words so fraught with dread import to one of her refined sensibilities.

"Pooh!" Burke returned, gallantly. "Why, my dear young lady, n.o.body in the world could think of you and a cell at the same time--no, indeed!"

Instantly, the girl responded to this bald flattery. She fairly radiated appreciation of the compliment, as she turned her eyes, dewy with tears, on the somewhat fl.u.s.tered Inspector.

"Oh, thank you!" she exclaimed, with naive enjoyment.

Forthwith, Burke set out to make the most of this favorable opportunity.

"Are you sure you've told me all you know about this woman?" he questioned.

"Oh, yes! I've only seen her two or three times," came the ready response. The voice changed to supplication, and again the clasped hands were extended beseechingly.

"Oh, please, Commissioner! Won't you let me go home?"

The use of a t.i.tle higher than his own flattered the Inspector, and he was moved to graciousness. Besides, it was obvious that his police net in this instance had enmeshed only the most harmless of doves. He smiled encouragingly.

"Well, now, little lady," he said, almost tenderly, "if I let you go now, will you promise to let me know if you are able to think of anything else about this Turner woman?"

"I will--indeed, I will!" came the fervent a.s.surance. There was something almost--quite provocative in the flash of grat.i.tude that shone forth from the blue eyes of the girl in that moment of her superlative relief. It moved Burke to a desire for rehabilitation in her estimation.

"Now, you see," he went on in his heavy voice, yet very kindly, and with a sort of ma.s.sive playfulness in his manner, "no one has hurt you--not even a little bit, after all. Now, you run right home to your mother."

The girl did not need to be told twice. On the instant, she sprang up joyously, and started toward the door, with a final ravishing smile for the pleased official at the desk.

"I'll go just as fast as ever I can," the musical voice made a.s.surance blithely.

"Give my compliments to your father," Burke requested courteously. "And tell him I'm sorry I frightened you."

The girl turned at the door.... After all, too great haste might be indiscreet.

"I will, Commissioner," she promised, with an arch smile. "And I know papa will be so grateful to you for all your kindness to me!"

It was at this critical moment that Ca.s.sidy entered from the opposite side of the office. As his eyes fell on the girl at the door across from him, his stolid face lighted in a grin. And, in that same instant of recognition between the two, the color went out of the girl's face. The little red lips snapped together in a line of supreme disgust against this vicissitude of fate after all her manoeuverings in the face of the enemy. She stood motionless in wordless dismay, impotent before this disaster forced on her by untoward chance.

"h.e.l.lo, Aggie!" the detective remarked, with a smirk, while the Inspector stared from one to the other with rounded eyes of wonder, and his jaw dropped from the stark surprise of this new development.

The girl returned deliberately to the chair she had occupied through the interview with the Inspector, and dropped into it weakly. Her form rested there limply now, and the blue eyes stared disconsolately at the blank wall before her. She realized that fate had decreed defeat for her in the game. It was after a minute of silence in which the two men sat staring that at last she spoke with a savage wrath against the pit into which she had fallen after her arduous efforts.

"Ain't that the d.a.m.nedest luck!"

For a little interval still, Burke turned his glances from the girl to Ca.s.sidy, and then back again to the girl, who sat immobile with her blue eyes steadfastly fixed on the wall. The police official was, in truth, totally bewildered. Here was inexplicable mystery. Finally, he addressed the detective curtly.

"Ca.s.sidy, do you know this woman?"

"Sure, I do!" came the placid answer. He went on to explain with the direct brevity of his kind. "She's little Aggie Lynch--con' woman, from Buffalo--two years for blackmail--did her time at Burnsing."

With this succinct narrative concerning the girl who sat mute and motionless in the chair with her eyes fast on the wall, Ca.s.sidy relapsed into silence, during which he stared rather perplexedly at his chief, who seemed to be in the throes of unusual emotion. As the detective expressed it in his own vernacular: For the first time in his experience, the Inspector appeared to be actually "rattled."

For a little time, there was silence, the while Burke sat staring at the averted face of the girl. His expression was that of one who has just undergone a soul-stirring shock. Then, presently, he set his features grimly, rose from his chair, and walked to a position directly in the front of the girl, who still refused to look in his direction.

"Young woman----" he began, severely. Then, of a sudden he laughed.

"You picked the right business, all right, all right!" he said, with a certain enthusiasm. He laughed aloud until his eyes were only slits, and his ample paunch trembled vehemently.

"Well," he went on, at last, "I certainly have to hand it to you, kid.

You're a beaut'!"

Aggie sniffed vehemently in rebuke of the gross partiality of fate in his behalf.

"Just as I had him goin'!" she said bitterly, as if in self-communion, without shifting her gaze from the blank surface of the wall.

Now, however, Burke was reminded once again of his official duties, and he turned quickly to the attentive Ca.s.sidy.

"Have you got a picture of this young woman?" he asked brusquely. And when Ca.s.sidy had replied in the negative, he again faced the adventuress with a mocking grin--in which mockery, too, was a fair fragment for himself, who had been so thoroughly within her toils of blandishment.

"I'd dearly love to have a photograph of you, Miss Helen Travers West,"

he said.

The speech aroused the stolid detective to a new interest.

"Helen Travers West?" he repeated, inquiringly.

"Oh, that's the name she told me," the Inspector explained, somewhat shamefacedly before this question from his inferior. Then he chuckled, for he had sense of humor sufficient to triumph even over his own discomfiture in this encounter. "And she had me winging, too!" he confessed. "Yes, I admit it." He turned to the girl admiringly. "You sure are immense, little one--immense!" He smiled somewhat more in his official manner of mastery. "And now, may I have the honor of asking you to accept the escort of Mr. Ca.s.sidy to our gallery."

Aggie sprang to her feet and regarded the Inspector with eyes in which was now no innocence, such as had beguiled him so recently from those ingenuous...o...b...

"Oh, can that stuff!" she cried, crossly. "Let's get down to business on the dot--and no frills on it! Keep to cases!"

"Now you're talking," Burke declared, with a new appreciation of the versatility of this woman--who had not been wasting her time hitherto, and had no wish to lose it now.

"You can't do anything to us," Aggie declared, strongly. There remained no trace of the shrinking violet that had been Miss Helen Travers West.

Now, she revealed merely the business woman engaged in a fight against the law, which was opposed definitely to her peculiar form of business.

"You can't do anything to me, and you know you can't!" she went on, with an almost convincing tranquillity of a.s.sertion. "Why, I'll be sprung inside an hour." There came a ripple of laughter that reminded the Inspector of the fashion in which he had been overcome by this woman's wiles. And she spoke with a cert.i.tude of conviction that was rather terrifying to one who had just fallen under the stress of her spells.

"Why, habeas corpus is my lawyer's middle name!"