ef. "So his
family must desert him, and his wife must leave him! The poor boy must
stand absolutely alone in the world, and face a trial for his life! Is
that your idea?"

The banker made no reply. Snapping her fingers, she went on:

"Well, it isn't mine, Mr. Jeffries! I won't consent to a divorce! I
won't leave America! And I'll see him just as often as I can, even if I
have to sit in the Tombs prison all day. As for his defense, I'll find
some one. I'll go to Judge Brewster again, and if he still refuses, I'll
go to some one else. There must be some good, big-hearted lawyer in
this great city who'll take up his case."

Trembling with emotion she readjusted her veil and with her handkerchief
dried her tear-stained face. Going toward the door, she said:

"You needn't trouble yourself any more, Mr. Jeffries. We shan't need
your help. Thank you very much for the interview. It was very kind of
you to listen so patiently. Good afternoon, sir."

Before the astonished banker could stop her, she had thrown back the
tapestry and disappeared through the door.

CHAPTER XIII.

In the very heart of Manhattan, right in the centre of the city's most
congested district, an imposing edifice of gray stone, mediaeval in its
style of architecture, towered high above all the surrounding dingy
offices and squalid tenements. Its massive construction, steep walls,
pointed turrets, raised parapets and long, narrow, slit-like windows,
heavily barred, gave it the aspect of a feudal fortress incongruously
set down plumb in the midst of twentieth-century New York. The dull roar
of Broadway hummed a couple of blocks away; in the distance loomed the
lofty, graceful spans of Brooklyn Bridge, jammed with its opposing
streams of busy inter-urban traffic. The adjacent streets were filled
with the din of hurrying crowds, the rattle of vehicles, the cries of
vendors, the clang of street cars, the ugh! ugh! of speeding
automobiles. The active, pulsating life of the metropolis surged like a
rising flood about the tall gray walls, yet there was no response
within. Grim, silent, sinister, the City Prison, popularly known as "the
Tombs," seemed to have nothing in common with the daily activities of
the big town in which, notwithstanding, it unhappily played an important
part.

The present prison is a vastly different place to the old jail from
which it got its melancholy cognomen. To-day there is not the slightest
justification for the lugubr