ches, rows of squalid
tenements and cheap, tumble-down frame houses silhouetted themselves in
broken, jagged points against the sky-line. And now and then a man spoke
to her--his untrained fingers fumbling in clumsy homage at the brim of
his hat.

How strange a thing memory was! How strange, too, the coincidences that
sometimes roused it into activity! It was a man, a thief, just like the
man to-night, who had first brought her here into this shadowland of
crime. That was just before her father had died. Her father had been
a mining engineer, and, though an American, had been for many years
resident in South America as the representative of a large English
concern. He had been in ill health for a year down there, when, acting
on his physician's advice, he had come to New York for consultation, and
she had accompanied him. They had taken a little flat, the engineer had
placed himself in the hands of a famous specialist, and an operation had
been decided upon. And then, a few days prior to the date set for the
operation and before her father, who was still able to be about, had
entered the hospital, the flat had been broken into during the early
morning hours. The thief, obviously not counting on the engineer's
wakefulness, had been caught red-handed. At first defiant, the man had
finally broken down, and had told a miserable story. It was hackneyed
possibly, the same story told by a thousand others as a last defense in
the hope of inducing leniency through an appeal to pity, but somehow to
her that night the story had rung true. Pete McGee, alias the Bussard,
the man had said his name was. He couldn't get any work; there was the
shadow of a long abode in Sing Sing that lay upon him as a curse--a job
here to-day, his record discovered to-morrow, and the next day out on
the street again. It was very old, very threadbare, that story; there
were even the sick wife, the hungry, unclothed children; but to her it
had rung true. Her father had not placed the slightest faith in it,
and but for her intervention the Bussard would have been incontinently
consigned to the mercies of the police.

Her face softened suddenly now as she walked along. She remembered well
that scene, when, at the end, she had written down the address the man
had given her.

"Father is going to let you go, McGee, because I ask him to," she had
said. "And to-morrow morning I will go to this address, and if I find
your story is true, as I believe it is, I