“To retreat?” she asked. “But I thought the object of this house——”
“Allow me to explain. The purpose of the institution is to help girls who repent of their waywardness, not to encourage hardened sinners. I have followed your career in the newspapers. I consider it a privilege to have read your latest attempt at extortion. Naturally I assume that, once your present handicap is overcome, you’ll go on, like a brook, purling round the hearts of men—on and on and on. There are public reformatories for persons of your sort. To realize our ideals, we must be somewhat particular here.”
Mrs. Hutton, as well as the girl, looked at him. Drawn to the full of his dapper height, his face lit by artistic appreciation of his own pose, his gesture delicately drawn, he might have impressed a stranger as the benevolent of the inmates’ praise.
But Mary Hutton was not a stranger. That equivocally proud yet contemptuous smile was on her lips as she turned to Dolores.
“You at least will have a child. I have nothing—nothing,” she remarked. “Don’t be annoyed by a little thing like Vincent Seff turned to philanthropy and good works.”
The ultimatum of the head of the Retreat increased the urgency of Dolores’ letter. She posted it herself before setting out to find a new place. She was fortunate, however. Before night she had located a rooming-house “lady” sufficiently in need, sufficiently pessimistic, sufficiently old and shiftless and poor-spirited to waive references and accept two weeks’ rental in advance. Here she laid in what she still could pay for toward her needs; here lived along and waited with hard-dying hope.
Since she had found the place so soon, she regretted the hasty posting of her note. Rather than chance another of those risks to John, of which the deposed shop-keeper’s suggestions had increased her fear, she had given her new address to that quite good imitation of a mother, the matron of the Retreat, for the forwarding of mail or the convenience of any friends who might telephone about her or call to see her.
The incidents of her days became the variation from morning confidence to evening despondency; of her nights, the discarding, under crush of the blackness, of one after another of her schemes for a second and more direct message. And, whether in the daytime or at night, a bark of the dog at an unaccustomed sound would rouse her to radiance—to heart-hammering joy; or his growling return to the tedium of his life would bring her back to heart-stilling disappointment. Either John had made no response to her appeal or the matron had failed to supply the address.
Heavier upon her pressed thoughts of the power of her enemies. Where would her note lead Catherine Cabot if it chanced into the hands of her hirelings? What might not Seff reveal? How much might those omniscient detectives learn from their watch of John?