"What would you do with those people?" asked Chelda, softly drawing a silk thread out of her work.
"With what people,--criminals, you mean?" asked her aunt.
"Yes,--those low creatures who prey on society?"
"I would do with them just what is done now; only I should be more severe."
"As you were last night," remarked Chelda, in a low voice.
Her aunt did not hear her. She was addressing a question to Derrice, "Child, suppose all the criminals in the world were suddenly thrown into your power; what would you do with them?"
Derrice had some time ago finished her conversation with Captain Veevers, and had been listening to the extracts from the book. Her face now glowed vividly at the possibility suggested. "Oh, I would put them all together--no, I would scatter them. I would put a few here, a few there, all among good people. I would beg them to change--"
"And suppose they would not," pursued Miss Gastonguay.
"They would change, dear Miss Gastonguay. I am sure they would, but if there were some who were very bad I would have a nice little prison for them where they would be happy, but that they could never get out of."
Miss Gastonguay smiled grimly, and turned to Chelda. "And you, my niece, what would you do?"
Chelda's soul was steeped in the very bitterness of hatred as she surveyed the compassionate face beyond her, but she gave no outward sign of it, and responded with her usual composure, "Such people all seem like vipers to me. They are not of our kind. I should not allow one to run loose, not one. I would severely isolate them so that they might not bite me."
"You are wrong--wrong!" interposed Derrice. "They are like ourselves. They are not different. Once when I was going along a street in New York with my father I saw a poor man being arrested. My father said--"
She stopped short, overpowered not by the remembrance of the criminal, but by her loss of the dear companionship of former days.
"Well, what did your father say?" asked Miss Gastonguay, in a hard, dry voice.
"He said," Derrice continued, with difficulty, "he said, 'They have got the wrong man.' I tried to drag him forward to tell the policeman, but he held me back. 'You can't get the real criminal,' he told me. 'Probably you would have to dig him out of some grave. This man is what his parents have made him.'"