pect was inevitable, since he had some sensibilities, though they
were coarsened, and they sensed vaguely the maelstrom of emotions that
now swirled in the girl's breast.

To Mary Turner, this was the wonderful hour. In it, the vindication of
her innocence was made complete. The story was there recorded in black
and white on the page written by Helen Morris. It mattered little--or
infinitely much!--that it came too late. She had gained her evil place
in the world, was a notorious woman in fact, was even now a prisoner
under suspicion of murder. Nevertheless, she felt a thrill of ecstasy
over this written document--which it had never occurred to her to wrest
from the girl at the time of the oral confession. Now that it had been
proffered, the value of it loomed above almost all things else in the
world. It proclaimed undeniably the wrong under which she had suffered.
She was not the thief the court had adjudged her. "Now, there's nobody
here but just you and me. Come on, now--put me wise!"

Mary was again the resourceful woman who was glad to pit her brain
against the contriving of those who fought her. So, at this moment, she
seemed pliant to the will of the man who urged her thus cunningly. Her
quick glance around the office was of a sort to delude the Inspector
into a belief that she was yielding to his lure.

"Are you sure no one will ever know?" she asked, timorously.

"Nobody but you and me," Burke declared, all agog with anticipation of
victory at last. "I give you my word!"

Mary met the gaze of the Inspector fully. In the same instant,
she flashed on him a smile that was dazzling, the smile of a woman
triumphant in her mastery of the situation. Her face was radiant,
luminous with honest mirth. There was something simple and genuine
in her beauty that thrilled the man before her, the man trying so
vindictively to trap her to her own undoing. For all his grossness,
Burke was of shrewd perceptions, and somewhere, half-submerged under
the sordid nature of his calling, was a love of things esthetic, a
responsiveness to the appeals of beauty. Now, as his glance searched
the face of the girl who was bubbling with mirth, he experienced an odd
warming of his heart under the spell of her loveliness--a loveliness
wholly feminine, pervasive, wholesome. But, too, his soul shook in a
premonition of catastrophe, for there was mischief in the beaming eyes
of softest violet. There was a demon of mockery playing in the curves