led once before; that one had been
sent to "the Island" for thirty days; the next one was an habitual
offender. It was a tragic monotony. Sometimes the magistrate would
summon the sweet-faced matron to have a talk with some young girl,
evidently a "green one" for whom there might be hope. There was more
kindliness and effort to reform the prisoners behind those piercing
eyes of the judge than one might have supposed to hear him drone out
his judgment: "Thirty days, Molly"; "Ten dollars, Aggie--the Island
next time, sure"; "Five dollars for you, Sadie," and so on. There was
a weary, hopeless look in the magistrate's eyes, had you studied him
close at hand. He knew, better than the reformers, of the horrors of
the social evil, at the very bottom of the cup of sin. Better than
they could he understand the futility of garrulous legislation at the
State Capitol, to be offset by ignorance, avarice, weakness and disease
in the congestion of the big, unwieldy city. When he fined the girls
he knew that it meant only a hungry day, one less silk garment or
perhaps a beating from an angry and disappointed "lover." When he sent
them to the workhouse their activities were merely discontinued for a
while to learn more vileness from companions in their imprisonment; to
make for greater industry--busier vice and quicker disease upon their
return to the streets. The occasional cases in which there was some
chance for regeneration were more welcome to him, even, than to the
weak and sobbing girls, hopeless with the misery of their early
defeats. Yet, the magistrate knew only too well the miserable minimum
of cases which ever resulted in real rescue and removal from the sordid
existence.

Once as low as the rail of the Night Court--a girl seldom escaped from
the slime into which she had dragged herself. And yet _had_ she
dragged herself there? Was _she_ to blame? Was she to pay the
consequences in the last Reckoning of Accounts?

This thought came to Officer Bobbie Burke as he watched the horrible
drama drag monotonously through its brief succession of sordid scenes.

The expression of the magistrate, the same look of sympathetic misery
on the face of the matron, and even on many of the detectives,
automatons who had chanted this same official requiem of dead souls,
years of nights ... not a sombre tone of the gruesome picture was lost
to Burke's keen eyes.

"Some one has to pay; some one has to pay! I wonder who?" mutter