Having answered these questions to the best of her ability, Jennie raised the subject of what she could bring him to eat. The guard who had remained in the room informed her that she could bring him anything, at which she promised to return next day. For the minute she was at the end of her forces. If she went on much longer they would snap.
"I'll run away now, Ted," she said, rising. "It's splendid to see you so bucked up. I'll be here again about this time to-morrow, and bring you something nice. Momma's busy already making you a fruit cake." She added, as she held him by the hand, "I suppose you'll have to have a lawyer."
A memory came to him like that of something heard while under an anæsthetic.
"I think the judge said this morning that he'd appoint some one to—to defend me."
"Oh, we'll do better than that," she smiled, cheerily. "I've got some money. We'll have a lawyer of our own."
The journey home was the hardest thing Jennie had ever had to face. Teddy! Teddy! Teddy brought to this! It was all she could say to herself. The bare fact dwarfed all its causes, immediate or remote.
Eager for privacy in which to sob, she was speeding along Indiana Avenue when, happening to glance in the direction of her home, she saw Gladys standing on the sidewalk. Gladys, having at the same minute perceived her, started with a violent bound in her direction. She, too, had a newspaper in her hand, leading Jennie to expect a repetition of Gussie's episode that morning.
It was such a repetition, and it was not. It was, to the extent that Gladys had been informed of Teddy's drama much as her elder sister at Corinne's, though later in the day. At a minute when trade was slack and Gladys ruminantly chewing gum, Miss Hattie Belweather, a cash girl in the gloves, slipped up to her to say:
"Oh, Gladys Follett, if you knew what Sunshine Bright's been saying about you, you'd never speak to her again!" Hattie Belweather, who had the blank, innocent expression of a sheep, having paused for the natural inquiry, went on breathlessly. "She says your brother Teddy robbed a bank and killed a man and is in jail over at Ellenbrook and—"
Such foolish calumny Gladys could so far contemn as to say with quiet force: