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 embarrassment 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 apron 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 God!” 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 attitude 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. Cassidy, 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!”
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. Nobody 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. “Nobody 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 assuage 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 embarrassment 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 passion, “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,” Cassidy said. He meant to make his manner very
reassuring. “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 assertion. “Why, if the trial had been fair, I shouldn't be here.”
The harsh voice of Cassidy again broke in on the passion 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 coarse
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 asserted, 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 massive 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 God 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 coarse
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 ejaculated, 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
circumstances. 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.
“I have something to tell you, Mr. Gilder,” she said, quietly. “Only,
I--I sort of lost my grip on the way here, with this man by my side.”
“Most of 'em do, the first time,” the officer commented, with a certain
grim appreciation.
“Well?” Gilder insisted querulously, as the girl hesitated.
At once, Mary went on speaking, and now a little increase of vigor
trembled in her tones.
“When you sit in a cell for three months waiting for your trial, as I
did, you think a lot. And, so, I got the idea that if I could talk to
you, I might be able to make you understand what's really wrong. And if
I could do that, and so help out the other girls, what has happened to
me would not, after all, be quite so awful--so useless, somehow.” Her
voice lowered to a quick pleading, and she bent toward the man at the
desk. “Mr. Gilder,” she questioned, “do you really want to stop the
girls from stealing?”
“Most certainly I do,” came the forcible reply.
The girl spoke with a great earnestness, deliberately.
“Then, give them a fair chance.”
The magnate stared in sincere astonishment over this absurd, this futile
suggestion for his guidance.
“What do you mean?” he vociferated, with rising indignation. There was
an added hostility in his demeanor, for it seemed to him that this thief
of his goods whom he had brought to justice was daring to trifle with
him. He grew wrathful over the suspicion, but a secret curiosity still
held his temper within bounds “What do you mean?” he repeated; and now
the full force of his strong voice set the room trembling.
The tones of the girl came softly musical, made more delicately resonant
to the ear by contrast with the man's roaring.
“Why,” she said, very gently, “I mean just this: Give them a living
chance to be honest.”
“A living chance!” The two words were exploded with dynamic violence.
The preposterousness of the advice fired Gilder with resentment so
pervasive that through many seconds he found himself unable to express
the rage that flamed within him.
The girl showed herself undismayed by his anger.
“Yes,” she went on, quietly; “that's all there is to it. Give them a
living chance to get enough food to eat, and a decent room to sleep in,
and shoes that will keep their feet off the pavement winter mornings. Do
you think that any girl wants to steal? Do you think that any girl wants
to risk----?”
By this time, however, Gilder had regained his powers of speech, and he
interrupted stormily.
“And is this what you have taken up my time for? You want to make a
maudlin plea for guilty, dishonest girls, when I thought you really
meant to bring me facts.”
Nevertheless, Mary went on with her arraignment uncompromisingly. There
was a strange, compelling energy in her inflections that penetrated even
the pachydermatous officer, so that, though he thought her raving, he
let her rave on, which was not at all his habit of conduct, and did
indeed surprise him mightily. As for Gilder, he felt helpless in some
puzzling fashion that was totally foreign to his ordinary self. He was
still glowing with wrath over the method by which he had been victimized
into giving the girl a hearing. Yet, despite his chagrin, he realized
that he could not send her from him forthwith. By some inexplicable
spell she bound him impotent.
“We work nine hours a day,” the quiet voice went on, a curious pathos
in the rich timbre of it; “nine hours a day, for six days in the week.
That's a fact, isn't it? And the trouble is, an honest girl can't live
on six dollars a week. She can't do it, and buy food and clothes, and
pay room-rent and carfare. That's another fact, isn't it?”
Mary regarded the owner of the store with grave questioning in her
violet eyes. Under the urgency of emotion, color crept into the pallid
cheeks, and now her face was very beautiful--so beautiful, indeed, that
for a little the charm of its loveliness caught the man's gaze, and he
watched her with a new respect, born of appreciation for her feminine
delightfulness. The impression was far too brief. Gilder was not given
to esthetic raptures over women. Always, the business instinct was the
dominant. So, after the short period of amazed admiration over such
unexpected winsomeness, his thoughts flew back angrily to the matters
whereof she spoke so ridiculously.
“I don't care to discuss these things,” he declared peremptorily, as the
girl remained silent for a moment.
“And I have no wish to discuss anything,” Mary returned evenly. “I
only want to give you what you asked for--facts.” A faint smile of
reminiscence curved the girl's lips. “When they first locked me up,” she
explained, without any particular evidence of emotion, “I used to sit
and hate you.”
“Oh, of course!” came the caustic exclamation from Gilder.
“And then, I thought that perhaps you did not understand,” Mary
continued; “that, if I were to tell you how things really are, it might
be you would change them somehow.”
At this ingenuous statement, the owner of the store gave forth a gasp of
sheer stupefaction.
“I!” he cried, incredulously. “I change my business policy because you
ask me to!”
There was something imperturbable in the quality of the voice as the
girl went resolutely forward with her explanation. It was as if she
were discharging a duty not to be gainsaid, not to be thwarted by
any difficulty, not even the realization that all the effort must be
ultimately in vain.
“Do you know how we girls live?--but, of course, you don't. Three of us
in one room, doing our own cooking over the two-burner gas-stove, and
our own washing and ironing evenings, after being on our feet for nine
hours.”
The enumeration of the sordid details left the employer absolutely
unmoved, since he lacked the imagination necessary to sympathize
actually with the straining evil of a life such as the girl had known.
Indeed, he spoke with an air of just remonstrance, as if the girl's
charges were mischievously faulty.
“I have provided chairs behind the counters,” he stated.
There was no especial change in the girl's voice as she answered his
defense. It continued musically low, but there was in it the insistent
note of sincerity.
“But have you ever seen a girl sitting in one of them?” she questioned,
coldly. “Please answer me. Have you? Of course not,” she said, after a
little pause during which the owner had remained silent. She shook
her head in emphatic negation. “And do you understand why? It's simply
because every girl knows that the manager of her department would think
he could get along without her, if he were to see her sitting down
----loafing, you know! So, she would be discharged. All it amounts to
is that, after being on her feet for nine hours, the girl usually walks
home, in order to save carfare. Yes, she walks, whether sick or well.
Anyhow, you are generally so tired, it don't make much difference which
you are.”
Gilder was fuming under these strictures, which seemed to him altogether
baseless attacks on himself. His exasperation steadily waxed against the
girl, a convicted felon, who thus had the audacity to beard him.
“What has all this to do with the question of theft in the store?”
he rumbled, huffily. “That was the excuse for your coming here. And,
instead of telling me something, you rant about gas-stoves and carfare.”
The inexorable voice went on in its monotone, as if he had not spoken.
“And, when you are really sick, and have to stop work, what are you
going to do then? Do you know, Mr. Gilder, that the first time a
straight girl steals, it's often because she had to have a doctor--or
some luxury like that? And some of them do worse than steal. Yes, they
do--girls that started straight, and wanted to stay that way. But, of
course, some of them get so tired of the whole grind that--that----”
The man who was the employer of hundreds concerning whom these grim
truths were uttered, stirred uneasily in his chair, and there came a
touch of color into the healthy brown of his cheeks as he spoke his
protest.
“I'm not their guardian. I can't watch over them after they leave the
store. They are paid the current rate of wages--as much as any other
store pays.” As he spoke, the anger provoked by this unexpected
assault on him out of the mouth of a convict flamed high in virtuous
repudiation. “Why,” he went on vehemently, “no man living does more
for his employees than I do. Who gave the girls their fine rest-rooms
upstairs? I did! Who gave them the cheap lunch-rooms? I did!”
“But you won't pay them enough to live on!” The very fact that the words
were spoken without any trace of rancor merely made this statement of
indisputable truth obnoxious to the man, who was stung to more savage
resentment in asserting his impugned self-righteousness.
“I pay them the same as the other stores do,” he repeated, sullenly.
Yet once again, the gently cadenced voice gave answer, an answer
informed with that repulsive insistence to the man who sought to resist
her indictment of him.
“But you won't pay them enough to live on.” The simple lucidity of the
charge forbade direct reply.
Gilder betook himself to evasion by harking back to the established
ground of complaint.
“And, so, you claim that you were forced to steal. That's the plea you
make for yourself and your friends.”
“I wasn't forced to steal,” came the answer, spoken in the monotone that
had marked her utterance throughout most of the interview. “I wasn't
forced to steal, and I didn't steal. But, all the same, that's the plea,
as you call it, that I'm making for the other girls. There are hundreds
of them who steal because they don't get enough to eat. I said I would
tell you how to stop the stealing. Well, I have done it. Give the girls
a fair chance to be honest. You asked me for the names, Mr. Gilder.
There's only one name on which to put the blame for the whole
business--and that name is Edward Gilder!... Now, won't you do something
about it?”
At that naked question, the owner of the store jumped up from his
chair, and stood glowering at the girl who risked a request so full of
vituperation against himself.
“How dare you speak to me like this?” he thundered.
There was no disconcertion exhibited by the one thus challenged. On the
contrary, she repeated her question with a simple dignity that still
further outraged the man.
“Won't you, please, do something about it?”
“How dare you?” he shouted again. Now, there was stark wonder in his
eyes as he put the question.
“Why, I dared,” Mary Turner explained, “because you have done all the
harm you can to me. And, now, I'm trying to give you the chance to do
better by the others. You ask me why I dare. I have a right to dare!
I have been straight all my life. I have wanted decent food and warm
clothes, and--a little happiness, all the time I have worked for you,
and I have gone without those things, just to stay straight.... The end
of it all is: You are sending me to prison for something I didn't do.
That's why I dare!”
Cassidy, the officer in charge of Mary Turner, had stood patiently
beside her all this while, always holding her by the wrist. He had
been mildly interested in the verbal duel between the big man of the
department store and this convict in his own keeping. Vaguely, he had
marveled at the success of the frail girl in declaiming of her injuries
before the magnate. He had felt no particular interest beyond that,
merely looking on as one might at any entertaining spectacle. The
question at issue was no concern of his. His sole business was to take
the girl away when the interview should be ended. It occurred to him now
that this might, in fact, be the time to depart. It seemed, indeed, that
the insistent reiteration of the girl had at last left he owner of the
store quite powerless to answer. It was possible, then, that it were
wiser the girl should be removed. With the idea in mind, he stared
inquiringly at Gilder until he caught that flustered gentleman's eye.
A nod from the magnate sufficed him. Gilder, in truth, could not trust
himself just then to an audible command. He was seriously disturbed by
the gently spoken truths that had issued from the girl's lips. He was
not prepared with any answer, though he hotly resented every word of
her accusation. So, when he caught the question in the glance of
the officer, he felt a guilty sensation of relief as he signified an
affirmative by his gesture.
Cassidy faced about, and in his movement there was a tug at the wrist
of the girl that set her moving toward the door. Her realization of what
this meant was shown in her final speech.
“Oh, he can take me now,” she said, bitterly. Then her voice rose above
the monotone that had contented her hitherto. Into the music of her
tones beat something sinister, evilly vindictive, as she faced about at
the doorway to which Cassidy had led her. Her face, as she scrutinized
once again the man at the desk, was coldly malignant.
“Three years isn't forever,” she said, in a level voice. “When I come
out, you are going to pay for every minute of them, Mr. Gilder. There
won't be a day or an hour that I won't remember that at the last it was
your word sent me to prison. And you are going to pay me for that. You
are going to pay me for the five years I have starved making money for
you--that, too! You are going to pay me for all the things I am losing
today, and----”
The girl thrust forth her left hand, on that side where stood the
officer. So vigorous was her movement that Cassidy's clasp was thrown
off the wrist. But the bond between the two was not broken, for from
wrist to wrist showed taut the steel chain of the manacles. The girl
shook the links of the handcuffs in a gesture stronger than words. In
her final utterance to the agitated man at the desk, there was a cold
threat, a prophecy of disaster. From the symbol of her degradation, she
looked to the man whose action had placed it there. In the clashing of
their glances, hers won the victory, so that his eyes fell before the
menace in hers.
“You are going to pay me for this!” she said. Her voice was little more
than a whisper, but it was loud in the listener's heart. “Yes, you are
going to pay--for this!”