The sergeant stood in the hall, silent and unconcerned, and when the matron asked him if he would be present at the interview he shook his head in a way that indicated the occasion as one of those when rules and regulations may be suspended. Ward, though he would have liked to go in, elected to remain outside with the sergeant, and as he did this he smiled reassuringly at Elizabeth, just then hesitating on the threshold.
"Oh, just step right in," said the matron, standing politely aside. And Elizabeth drew a deep breath and took the step.
She entered a small vestibule formed of high partitions of flanged boards that were painted drab; and she waited another moment, with its gathering anxiety and apprehension, for the matron to unlock a second door. The door opened with a whine and there, at the other end of the room in the morning light that struggled through the dirty glass of the grated window, she saw Gusta. The girl sat on a common wooden chair that had once been yellow, her hat on, her hands gloved and folded in her lap, as if in another instant she were to leave the room she somehow had an air of refusing to identify herself with.
"She's sat that way ever since she came," the matron whispered. "She hasn't slep' a wink, nor e't a mouthful."
"She's sat that way ever since she came"
Elizabeth's glance swept the room which was Gusta's prison, its walls lined higher than her head with sheet-iron; on one side a narrow cot, frowsy, filthy, that looked as if it were never made, though the dirty pillow told how many persons had slept in it--or tried to sleep in it. There was a wooden table, with a battered tin cup, a few crusts and crumbs of rye bread, and cockroaches that raced energetically about, pausing now and then to wave their inquisitive antennæ, and, besides, a cheap, small edition of the Bible, adding with a kind of brutal mockery the final touch of squalor to the room.
Gusta moved, looked up, made sure, and then suddenly rose and came toward her.
"I knew you'd come, Miss Elizabeth," the girl said, with a relief that compromised the certainty she had just expressed.
"I came as soon as I could, Gusta," said Elizabeth, with an amused conjecture as to what Gusta might think had the girl known what difficulties she had had in getting there at all.