“It's finished now—so help me, God!” The cabman's lips scarcely moved. He stared straight in front of him.
There was silence in the little, plainly furnished room for a moment; then the pawnbroker spoke again:
“I was born here in New York, you know, after my parents came from Italy. There was no money, nothing—only misery. I remember. It is like that, Hawkins, isn't it, where you have just come from, and where you have left the young wife?”
“Paul!” his wife cried out again. “How can you say such things? It—it is not like you!” Her lips quivered. She burst into tears, and buried her face in the little bundle she snuggled to her breast.
The cabman seemed curiously unmoved—as though dazed, almost detached from his immediate surroundings. He said nothing.
The pawnbroker's hands still rested on the cabman's shoulders, a strange gentleness in his touch that sought somehow, it seemed, to offer sympathy for his own merciless words.
“I have been thinking of this for a long time, ever since we knew that Claire could not get better,” he said. “We knew you would bring the little one here. There was no other place, except an institution. And so I have been thinking about it. What is the little one's name?”
The cabman shook his head.
“She has no name,” he said.
“Shall it be Claire, then?” asked the pawnbroker gently.