The girl, who had halted when the officer halted, as a matter of course, did not look up. She stood still, swaying a little as if from weakness.

Her voice was lifeless.

"Are you?" she said. "I did not know. n.o.body has been near me the whole time I have been in the Tombs." There was infinite pathos in the tones as she repeated the words so fraught with dreadfulness. "n.o.body has been near me!"

The secretary felt a sudden glow of shame. She realized the justice of that unconscious accusation, for, till to-day, she had had no thought of the suffering girl there in the prison. To a.s.suage remorse, she sought to give evidence as to a prevalent sympathy.

"Why," she exclaimed, "there was Helen Morris to-day! She has been asking about you again and again. She's all broken up over your trouble."

But the effort on the secretary's part was wholly without success.

"Who is Helen Morris?" the lifeless voice demanded. There was no interest in the question.

Sarah experienced a momentary astonishment, for she was still remembering the feverish excitement displayed by the salesgirl, who had declared herself to be a most intimate friend of the convict. But the mystery was to remain unsolved, since Gilder now entered the office. He walked with the quick, bustling activity that was ordinarily expressed in his every movement. He paused for an instant, as he beheld the two visitors in the center of the room, then he spoke curtly to the secretary, while crossing to his chair at the desk.

"You may go, Sarah. I will ring when I wish you again."

There followed an interval of silence, while the secretary was leaving the office and the girl with her warder stood waiting on his pleasure.

Gilder cleared his throat twice in an embarra.s.sment foreign to him, before finally he spoke to the girl. At last, the proprietor of the store expressed himself in a voice of genuine sympathy, for the spectacle of wo presented there before his very eyes moved him to a real distress, since it was indeed actual, something that did not depend on an appreciation to be developed out of imagination.

"My girl," Gilder said gently--his hard voice was softened by an honest regret--"my girl, I am sorry about this."

"You should be!" came the instant answer. Yet, the words were uttered with a total lack of emotion. It seemed from their intonation that the speaker voiced merely a statement concerning a recondite matter of truth, with which sentiment had nothing whatever to do. But the effect on the employer was unfortunate. It aroused at once his antagonism against the girl. His instinct of sympathy with which he had greeted her at the outset was repelled, and made of no avail. Worse, it was transformed into an emotion hostile to the one who thus offended him by rejection of the well-meant kindliness of his address

"Come, come!" he exclaimed, testily. "That's no tone to take with me."

"Why? What sort of tone do you expect me to take?" was the retort in the listless voice. Yet, now, in the dullness ran a faint suggestion of something sinister.

"I expected a decent amount of humility from one in your position," was the tart rejoinder of the magnate.

Life quickened swiftly in the drooping form of the girl. Her muscles tensed. She stood suddenly erect, in the vigor of her youth again. Her face lost in the same second its bleakness of pallor. The eyes opened widely, with startling abruptness, and looked straight into those of the man who had employed her.

"Would you be humble," she demanded, and now her voice was become softly musical, yet forbidding, too, with a note of pa.s.sion, "would you be humble if you were going to prison for three years--for something you didn't do?"

There was anguish in the cry torn from the girl's throat in the sudden access of despair. The words thrilled Gilder beyond anything that he had supposed possible in such case. He found himself in this emergency totally at a loss, and moved in his chair doubtfully, wishing to say something, and quite unable. He was still seeking some question, some criticism, some rebuke, when he was unfeignedly relieved to hear the policeman's harsh voice.

"Don't mind her, sir," Ca.s.sidy said. He meant to make his manner very rea.s.suring. "They all say that. They are innocent, of course! Yep--they all say it. It don't do 'em any good, but just the same they all swear they're innocent. They keep it up to the very last, no matter how right they've been got."

The voice of the girl rang clear. There was a note of insistence that carried a curious dignity of its own. The very simplicity of her statement might have had a power to convince one who listened without prejudice, although the words themselves were of the trite sort that any protesting criminal might utter.

"I tell you, I didn't do it!"

Gilder himself felt the surge of emotion that swung through these moments, but he would not yield to it. With his lack of imagination, he could not interpret what this time must mean to the girl before him.

Rather, he merely deemed it his duty to carry through this unfortunate affair with a scrupulous attention to detail, in the fashion that had always been characteristic of him during the years in which he had steadily mounted from the bottom to the top.

"What's the use of all this pretense?" he demanded, sharply. "You were given a fair trial, and there's an end of it."

The girl, standing there so feebly, seeming indeed to cling for support to the man who always held her thus closely by the wrist, spoke again with an astonishing clearness, even with a sort of vivacity, as if she explained easily something otherwise in doubt.

"Oh, no, I wasn't!" she contradicted bluntly, with a singular confidence of a.s.sertion. "Why, if the trial had been fair, I shouldn't be here."

The harsh voice of Ca.s.sidy again broke in on the pa.s.sion of the girl with a professional sneer.

"That's another thing they all say."

But the girl went on speaking fiercely, impervious to the man's coa.r.s.e sarcasm, her eyes, which had deepened almost to purple, still fixed piercingly on Gilder, who, for some reason wholly inexplicable to him, felt himself strangely disturbed under that regard.

"Do you call it fair when the lawyer I had was only a boy--one whom the court told me to take, a boy trying his first case--my case, that meant the ruin of my life? My lawyer! Why, he was just getting experience--getting it at my expense!" The girl paused as if exhausted by the vehemence of her emotion, and at last the sparkling eyes drooped and the heavy lids closed over them. She swayed a little, so that the officer tightened his clasp on her wrist.

There followed a few seconds of silence. Then Gilder made an effort to shake off the feeling that had so possessed him, and to a certain degree he succeeded.

"The jury found you guilty," he a.s.serted, with an attempt to make his voice magisterial in its severity.

Instantly, Mary was aroused to a new outburst of protest. Once again, her eyes shot their fires at the man seated behind the desk, and she went forward a step imperiously, dragging the officer in her wake.

"Yes, the jury found me guilty," she agreed, with fine scorn in the musical cadences of her voice. "Do you know why? I can tell you, Mr. Gilder. It was because they had been out for three hours without reaching a decision. The evidence didn't seem to be quite enough for some of them, after all. Well, the judge threatened to lock them up all night. The men wanted to get home. The easy thing to do was to find me guilty, and let it go at that. Was that fair, do you think? And that's not all, either. Was it fair of you, Mr. Gilder? Was it fair of you to come to the court this morning, and tell the judge that I should be sent to prison as a warning to others?"

A quick flush burned on the ma.s.sive face of the man whom she thus accused, and his eyes refused to meet her steady gaze of reproach.

"You know!" he exclaimed, in momentary consternation. Again, her mood had affected his own, so that through a few hurrying seconds he felt himself somehow guilty of wrong against this girl, so frank and so rebuking.

"I heard you in the courtroom," she said. "The dock isn't very far from the bench where you spoke to the judge about my case. Yes, I heard you.

It wasn't: Did I do it? Or, didn't I do it? No; it was only that I must be made a warning to others."

Again, silence fell for a tense interval. Then, finally, the girl spoke in a different tone. Where before her voice had been vibrant with the instinct of complaint against the mockery of justice under which she suffered, now there was a deeper note, that of most solemn truth.

"Mr. Gilder," she said simply, "as G.o.d is my judge, I am going to prison for three years for something I didn't do."

But the sincerity of her broken cry fell on unheeding ears. The coa.r.s.e nature of the officer had long ago lost whatever elements of softness there might have been to develop in a gentler occupation. As for the owner of the store, he was not sufficiently sensitive to feel the verity in the accents of the speaker. Moreover, he was a man who followed the conventional, with never a distraction due to imagination and sympathy.

Just now, too, he was experiencing a keen irritation against himself because of the manner in which he had been sensible to the influence of her protestation, despite his will to the contrary. That irritation against himself only reacted against the girl, and caused him to steel his heart to resist any tendency toward commiseration. So, this declaration of innocence was made quite in vain--indeed, served rather to strengthen his disfavor toward the complainant, and to make his manner harsher when she voiced the pitiful question over which she had wondered and grieved.

"Why did you ask the judge to send me to prison?"

"The thieving that has been going on in this store for over a year has got to stop," Gilder answered emphatically, with all his usual energy of manner restored. As he spoke, he raised his eyes and met the girl's glance fairly. Thought of the robberies was quite enough to make him pitiless toward the offender.

"Sending me to prison won't stop it," Mary Turner said, drearily.

"Perhaps not," Gilder sternly retorted. "But the discovery and punishment of the other guilty ones will." His manner changed to a business-like alertness. "You sent word to me that you could tell me how to stop the thefts in the store. Well, my girl, do this, and, while I can make no definite promise, I'll see what can be done about getting you out of your present difficulty." He picked up a pencil, pulled a pad of blank paper convenient to his hand, and looked at the girl expectantly, with aggressive inquiry in his gaze. "Tell me now," he concluded, "who were your pals?"

The matter-of-fact manner of this man who had unwittingly wronged her so frightfully was the last straw on the girl's burden of suffering. Under it, her patient endurance broke, and she cried out in a voice of utter despair that caused Gilder to start nervously, and even impelled the stolid officer to a frown of remonstrance.

"I have no pals!" she e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, furiously. "I never stole anything in my life. Must I go on telling you over and over again?" Her voice rose in a wail of misery. "Oh, why won't any one believe me?"

Gilder was much offended by this display of an hysterical grief, which seemed to his phlegmatic temperament altogether unwarranted by the circ.u.mstances. He spoke decisively.

"Unless you can control yourself, you must go." He pushed away the pad of paper, and tossed the pencil aside in physical expression of his displeasure. "Why did you send that message, if you have nothing to say?" he demanded, with increasing choler.

But now the girl had regained her former poise. She stood a little drooping and shaken, where for a moment she had been erect and tensed.

There was a vast weariness in her words as she answered.