第38章 THE THIEF(3)

"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 nobody 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 assent 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.Her voice grew cold with hate, the hate born of innocence long tortured."Then you are the one who----"The accusation was cut short by the girl's shriek.

"I am not! I am not, I tell you."

For a moment, Mary lost her poise.Her voice rose in a flare of rage.

"You are! You are!"

The craven spirit of the girl could struggle no more.She could only sit in a huddled, shaking heap of dread.The woman before her had been disciplined by sorrow to sternest self-control.

Though racked by emotions most intolerable, Mary soon mastered their expression to such an extent that when she spoke again, as if in self-communion, her words came quietly, yet with overtones of a supreme wo.

"She did it!" Then, after a little, she addressed the girl with a certain wondering before this mystery of horror."Why did you throw the blame on me?"The girl made several efforts before her mumbling became intelligible, and then her speech was gasping, broken with fear.