The owner of the store half-rose from his chair, then threw himself back with an exclamation of disgust. He again e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed the words with which he had greeted his son's unexpected kisses, but now there was a vast difference in the intonation.

"G.o.d bless my soul!" he cried. From his expression, it was clear that a pious aspiration was farthest from his thought. On the contrary! Again, he fell silent, considering the situation which Smithson had presented, and, as he reflected, his frown betrayed the emotion natural enough under the circ.u.mstances. At last, however, he mastered his irritation to some degree, and spoke his command briefly. "Well, Smithson, apologize to her. It can't be helped." Then his face lighted with a sardonic amus.e.m.e.nt. "And, Smithson," he went on with a sort of elephantine playfulness, "I shall take it as a personal favor if you will tactfully advise the lady that the goods at Altman and Stern's are really even finer than ours."

When Smithson had left the office, Gilder turned to his secretary.

"Take this," he directed, and he forthwith dictated the following letter to the husband of the lady who was not a thief, as Smithson had so painstakingly pointed out:

"J. W. GASKELL, ESQ.,

"Central National Bank, New York.

"MY DEAR Mr. GASKELL: I feel that I should be doing less than my duty as a man if I did not let you know at once that Mrs. Gaskell is in urgent need of medical attention. She came into our store to-day, and----"

He paused for a moment. "No, put it this way," he said finally:

"We found her wandering about our store to-day in a very nervous condition. In her excitement, she carried away about one hundred dollars' worth of rare laces. Not recognizing her, our store detective detained her for a short time. Fortunately for us all, Mrs. Gaskell was able to explain who she was, and she has just gone to her home. Hoping for Mrs. Gaskell's speedy recovery, and with all good wishes, I am,

"Yours very truly."

Yet, though he had completed the letter, Gilder did not at once take up another detail of his business. Instead, he remained plunged in thought, and now his frown was one of simple bewilderment. A number of minutes pa.s.sed before he spoke, and then his words revealed distinctly what had been his train of meditation.

"Sadie," he said in a voice of entire sincerity, "I can't understand theft. It's a thing absolutely beyond my comprehension."

On the heels of this ingenuous declaration, Smithson entered the office, and that excellent gentleman appeared even more perturbed than before.

"What on earth is the matter now?" Gilder spluttered, suspiciously.

"It's Mrs. Gaskell still," Smithson replied in great trepidation. "She wants you personally, Mr. Gilder, to apologize to her. She says that the action taken against her is an outrage, and she is not satisfied with the apologies of all the rest of us. She says you must make one, too, and that the store detective must be discharged for intolerable insolence."

Gilder bounced up from his chair angrily.

"I'll be d.a.m.ned if I'll discharge McCracken," he vociferated, glaring on Smithson, who shrank visibly.

But that mild and meek man had a certain strength of pertinacity.

Besides, in this case, he had been having mult.i.tudinous troubles of his own, which could be ended only by his employer's placating of the offended kleptomaniac.

"But about the apology, Mr. Gilder," he reminded, speaking very deferentially, yet with insistence.

Business instinct triumphed over the magnate's irritation, and his face cleared.

"Oh, I'll apologize," he said with a wry smile of discomfiture. "I'll make things even up a bit when I get an apology from Gaskell. I shrewdly suspect that that estimable gentleman is going to eat humble pie, of my baking, from his wife's recipe. And his will be an honest apology--which mine won't, not by a d.a.m.ned sight!" With the words, he left the room, in his wake a hugely relieved Smithson.

Alone in the office, Sarah neglected her work for a few minutes to brood over the startling contrast of events that had just forced itself on her attention. She was not a girl given to the a.n.a.lysis of either persons or things, but in this instance the movement of affairs had come close to her, and she was compelled to some depth of feeling by the two aspects of life on which to-day she looked. In the one case, as she knew it, a girl under the urge of poverty had stolen. That thief had been promptly arrested, finally she had been tried, had been convicted, had been sentenced to three years in prison. In the other case, a woman of wealth had stolen. There had been no punishment. A euphemism of kleptomania had been offered and accepted as sufficient excuse for her crime. A polite lie had been written to her husband, a banker of power in the city. To her, the proprietor of the store was even now apologizing in courteous phrases of regret.... And Mary Turner had been sentenced to three years in prison. Sadie shook her head in dolorous doubt, as she again bent over the keys of her typewriter. Certainly, some happenings in this world of ours did not seem quite fair.

CHAPTER V. THE VICTIM OF THE LAW.

It was on this same day that Sarah, on one of her numerous trips through the store in behalf of Gilder, was accosted by a salesgirl, whose name, Helen Morris, she chanced to know. It was in a spot somewhere out of the crowd, so that for the moment the two were practically alone.

The salesgirl showed signs of embarra.s.sment as she ventured to lay a detaining hand on Sarah's arm, but she maintained her position, despite the secretary's manner of disapproval.

"What on earth do you want?" Sarah inquired, snappishly.

The salesgirl put her question at once.

"What did they do to Mary Turner?"

"Oh, that!" the secretary exclaimed, with increased impatience over the delay, for she was very busy, as always. "You will all know soon enough."

"Tell me now." The voice of the girl was singularly compelling; there was something vividly impressive about her just now, though her pallid, prematurely mature face and the thin figure in the regulation black dress and white ap.r.o.n showed ordinarily only insignificant. "Tell me now," she repeated, with a monotonous emphasis that somehow moved Sarah to obedience against her will, greatly to her own surprise.

"They sent her to prison for three years," she answered, sharply.

"Three years?" The salesgirl had repeated the words in a tone that was indefinable, yet a tone vehement in its incredulous questioning. "Three years?" she said again, as one refusing to believe.

"Yes," Sarah said, impressed by the girl's earnestness; "three years."

"Good G.o.d!" There was no irreverence in the exclamation that broke from the girl's lips. Instead, only a tense horror that touched to the roots of emotion.

Sarah regarded this display of feeling on the part of the young woman before her with an increasing astonishment. It was not in her own nature to be demonstrative, and such strong expression of emotion as this she deemed rather suspicious. She recalled, in addition, the fact that his was not the first time that Helen Morris had shown a particular interest in the fate of Mary Turner. Sarah wondered why.

"Say," she demanded, with the directness habitual to her, "why are you so anxious about it? This is the third time you have asked me about Mary Turner. What's it to you, I'd like to know?"

The salesgirl started violently, and a deep flush drove the accustomed pallor from her cheeks. She was obviously much disturbed by the question.

"What is it to me?" she repeated in an effort to gain time. "Why, nothing--nothing at all!" Her expression of distress lightened a little as she hit on an excuse that might serve to justify her interest.

"Nothing at all, only--she's a friend of mine, a great friend of mine.

Oh, yes!" Then, in an instant, the look of relief vanished, as once again the terrible reality hammered on her consciousness, and an overwhelming dejection showed in the dull eyes and in the drooping curves of the white lips. There was a monotone of desolation as she went on speaking in a whisper meant for the ears of no other. "It's awful--three years! Oh, I didn't understand! It's awful!--awful!" With the final word, she hurried off, her head bowed. She was still murmuring brokenly, incoherently. Her whole att.i.tude was of wondering grief.

Sarah stared after the girl in complete mystification. She could not at first guess any possible cause for an emotion so poignant. Presently, however, her shrewd, though very prosaic, commonsense suggested a simple explanation of the girl's extraordinary distress.

"I'll bet that girl has been tempted to steal. But she didn't, because she was afraid." With this satisfactory conclusion of her wonderment, the secretary hurried on her way, quite content. It never occurred to her that the girl might have been tempted to steal--and had not resisted the temptation.

It was on account of this brief conversation with the salesgirl that Sarah was thinking intently of Mary Turner, after her return to the office, from which Gilder himself happened to be absent for the moment.

As the secretary glanced up at the opening of the door, she did not at first recognize the figure outlined there. She remembered Mary Turner as a tall, slender girl, who showed an underlying vitality in every movement, a girl with a face of regular features, in which was a complexion of blended milk and roses, with a radiant joy of life shining through all her arduous and vulgar conditions. Instead of this, now, she saw a frail form that stood swaying in the opening of the doorway, that bent in a sinister fashion which told of bodily impotence, while the face was quite bloodless. And, too, there was over all else a pall of helplessness--helplessness that had endured much, and must still endure infinitely more.

As a reinforcement of the dread import of that figure of wo, a man stood beside it, and one of his hands was clasped around the girl's wrist, a man who wore his derby hat somewhat far back on his bullet-shaped head, whose feet were conspicuous in shoes with very heavy soles and very square toes.

It was the man who now took charge of the situation. Ca.s.sidy, from Headquarters, spoke in a rough, indifferent voice, well suited to his appearance of stolid strength.

"The District Attorney told me to bring this girl here on my way to the Grand Central Station with her."

Sarah got to her feet mechanically. Somehow, from the raucous notes of the policeman's voice, she understood in a flash of illumination that the pitiful figure there in the doorway was that of Mary Turner, whom she had remembered so different, so frightfully different. She spoke with a miserable effort toward her usual liveliness.

"Mr. Gilder will be right back. Come in and wait." She wished to say something more, something of welcome or of mourning, to the girl there, but she found herself incapable of a single word for the moment, and could only stand dumb while the man stepped forward, with his charge following helplessly in his clutch.

The two went forward very slowly, the officer, carelessly conscious of his duty, walking with awkward steps to suit the feeble movements of the girl, the girl letting herself be dragged onward, aware of the futility of any resistance to the inexorable power that now had her in its grip, of which the man was the present agent. As the pair came thus falteringly into the center of the room, Sarah at last found her voice for an expression of sympathy.

"I'm sorry, Mary," she said, hesitatingly. "I'm terribly sorry, terribly sorry!"