"Wait a minute. Has your brother been taking money from the bank?"
At the thought that she might be making a false step, Jennie was appalled.
"Oh, don't you know that yet, sir?"
"Don't I know it yet? I don't know what you're talking about at all."
So the whole thing had to be explained. Two men had appeared on the previous afternoon in Indiana Avenue, accusing Teddy of systematic robbery. Teddy had so far corroborated the charge that he had absented himself from home and work. He had called up once, nominally from Paterson, but the two detectives didn't believe that it was. In any case, she had a little money of her own—her very own—two hundred and forty-five dollars it was—and as far as it would go she had come to make restitution. If it wasn't enough, they would sell the house as soon as they could get it on the market and pay up the balance, if he would only give the order that Teddy shouldn't be sent to jail.
Emboldened by his concentration on her story and herself, she took out the roll of bills from her bag, enlarging on her plea.
"You see, sir, it was this way. After my father had to leave the bank last fall, Teddy had to be our chief support, just on his eighteen a week. My two little sisters left school and went to work; but that didn't bring in much. Then there were the taxes, and the mortgages, and the expenses of my father's funeral, besides six of us having to eat—"
"You were working, too, weren't you?"
"Yes, sir; I was posing. But I only earned six a week."
"Only?"