“Then I have just one thing to say to you first. If you are going to live straight, start straight, and then go through with it. Do you know what that means?”
“You mean, keep straight all the time?” The girl spoke with a force drawn from the other's strength.
“I mean more than that,” Mary went on earnestly. “I mean, forget that you were ever in prison. I don't know what you have done--I don't think I care. But whatever it was, you have paid for it--a pretty big price, too.” Into these last words there crept the pathos of one who knew. The sympathy of it stirred the listener to fearful memories.
“I have, I have!” The thin voice broke, wailing.
“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.