ipping girl
eastward through the squalid streets, until at last they came to an
adequately lighted avenue, and there a taxicab was found. It carried
them farther north, and to the east still, until at last it came to a
halt before an apartment house that was rather imposing, set in a street
of humbler dwellings. Here, Garson paid the fare, and then helped
the girl to alight, and on into the hallway. Mary went with him quite
unafraid, though now with a growing curiosity. Strange as it all was,
she felt that she could trust this man who had plucked her from death,
who had worked over her with so much of tender kindliness. So, she
waited patiently; only, watched with intentness as he pressed the button
of a flat number. She observed with interest the thick, wavy gray of
his hair, which contradicted pleasantly the youthfulness of his
clean-shaven, resolute face, and the spare, yet well-muscled form.

The clicking of the door-latch sounded soon, and the two entered, and
went slowly up three flights of stairs. On the landing beyond the third
flight, the door of a rear flat stood open, and in the doorway appeared
the figure of a woman.

"Well, Joe, who's the skirt?" this person demanded, as the man and his
charge halted before her. Then, abruptly, the round, baby-like face of
the woman puckered in amazement. Her voice rose shrill. "My Gawd, if it
ain't Mary Turner!"

At that, the newcomer's eyes opened swiftly to their widest, and she
stared astounded in her turn.

"Aggie!" she cried.

CHAPTER VII. WITHIN THE LAW.

In the time that followed, Mary lived in the flat which Aggie Lynch
occupied along with her brother, Jim, a pickpocket much esteemed among
his fellow craftsmen. The period wrought transformations of radical and
bewildering sort in both the appearance and the character of the girl.
Joe Garson, the forger, had long been acquainted with Aggie and her
brother, though he considered them far beneath him in the social scale,
since their criminal work was not of that high kind on which he prided
himself. But, as he cast about for some woman to whom he might take the
hapless girl he had rescued, his thoughts fell on Aggie, and forthwith
his determination was made, since he knew that she was respectable,
viewed according to his own peculiar lights. He was relieved rather than
otherwise to learn that there was already an acquaintance between the
two women, and the fact that his charge had served time in prison did