same second its bleakness of pallor. The eyes opened widely, with startling abruptness, and looked straight into those of the man who had employed her.

"Would you be humble," she demanded, and now her voice was become softly musical, yet forbidding, too, with a note of passion, "would you be humble if you were going to prison for three years--for something you didn't do?"

There was anguish in the cry torn from the girl's throat in the sudden access of despair. The words thrilled Gilder beyond anything that he had supposed possible in such case. He found himself in this emergency totally at a loss, and moved in his chair doubtfully, wishing to say something, and quite unable. He was still seeking some question, some criticism, some rebuke, when he was unfeignedly relieved to hear the policeman's harsh voice.

"Don't mind her, sir," Cassidy said. He meant to make his manner very reassuring. "They all say that. They are innocent, of course! Yep--they all say it. They don't do 'em any good, but just the same they all swear they're innocent. They keep it up to the very last, no matter how right they've been got."

The voice of the girl rang clear. There was a note of insistence that carried a curious dignity of its own. The very simplicity of her statement might have had a power to convince one who listened without prejudice, although the words themselves were of the trite sort that any protesting criminal might utter.

"I tell you, I didn't do it!"

Gilder himself felt the surge of emotion that swung through these moments, but he would not yield to it. With his lack of imagination, he could not interpret what this time must mean to the girl before him. Rather, he merely deemed it his duty to carry through this unfortunate affair with a scrupulous attention to detail, in the fashion that had always been characteristic of him during the years in which he had steadily mounted from the bottom to the top.

"What's the use of all this pretense?" he demanded, sharply. "You were given a fair trial, and there's an end of it."

The girl, standing there so feebly, seeming indeed to cling for support to the man who always held her thus closely by the wrist, spoke again with an astonishing clearness, even with a sort of vivacity, as if she explained easily something otherwise in doubt.

"Oh, no, I wasn't!" she contradicted bluntly, with a singular 

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