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.

"I can't take it," she stammered. "I can't! I can't!"

Mary stood silent for a moment from sheer amazement over the change.
When she spoke, her voice had hardened a little. It is not agreeable to
have one's beneficence flouted.

"Didn't you come here for help?" she demanded.

"Yes," was the faltering reply, "but--but--I didn't kn