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 herse