Headquarters, spoke in a rough, indifferent voice, well suited to his appearance of stolid strength.

"The District Attorney told me to bring this girl here on my way to the Grand Central Station with her."

Sarah got to her feet mechanically. Somehow, from the raucous notes of the policeman's voice, she understood in a flash of illumination that the pitiful figure there in the doorway was that of Mary Turner, whom she had remembered so different, so frightfully different. She spoke with a miserable effort toward her usual liveliness.

"Mr. Gilder will be right back. Come in and wait." She wished to say something more, something of welcome or of mourning, to the girl there, but she found herself incapable of a single word for the moment, and could only stand dumb while the man stepped forward, with his charge following helplessly in his clutch.

The two went forward very slowly, the officer, carelessly conscious of his duty, walking with awkward steps to suit the feeble movements of the girl, the girl letting herself be dragged onward, aware of the futility of any resistance to the inexorable power that now had her in its grip, of which the man was the present agent. As the pair came thus falteringly into the center of the room, Sarah at last found her voice for an expression of sympathy.

"I'm sorry, Mary," she said, hesitatingly. "I'm terribly sorry, terribly sorry!"

The girl, who had halted when the officer halted, as a matter of course, did not look up. She stood still, swaying a little as if from weakness. Her voice was lifeless.

"Are you?" she said. "I did not know. Nobody has been near me the whole time I have been in the Tombs." There was infinite pathos in the tones as she repeated the words so fraught with dreadfulness. "Nobody has been near me!"

The secretary felt a sudden glow of shame. She realized the justice of that unconscious accusation, for, till today, she had had no thought of the suffering girl there in the prison. To assuage remorse, she sought to give evidence as to prevalent sympathy.

"Why," she exclaimed, "there was Helen Morris today! She has been asking about you again and again. She's all broken up over your trouble."

But the effort on the secretary's part was wholly without success.

"Who is Helen 

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