"I ain't got a bit of change in the house," she said, in a very different tone from the one she had used an hour before. "Mebbe you want it to count on this week."
Barry's fingers had closed around the knob.
"You can keep the change," he returned shortly. "I said I was leaving at once. I am not coming back."
"Lord save us!" she gasped. "Don't say that, Mr. Lawrence. Don't say as you're leavin' on account of them hasty words I spoke this mornin'. Fergit it. I'm a lonely widder woman as has to work my fingers to the bone to make both ends meet." Her voice took on a whining tone. "I has to count every penny, an' sometimes I'm most distracted, an' says what I don't mean. You——"
She broke off abruptly as the door slammed, and instantly a venomous expression leaped into her face. Like a flash, she had yanked the door open, and run out on the little stoop, to peer around the corner.
For a moment or two she stood shivering in the cold, her small, close-set eyes fixed intently on the back of the man hurrying toward Ninth Avenue. When he had disappeared she came back into the hall, her face thoughtful.
"Now, what's come to him, I wonder," she muttered, making her way slowly back to the basement stairs. "It's somethin', I'll be bound. I never seen him look that way before. He was excited, too, when he come in before. If I'd had any sense I'd 'a' looked around his room whilst he was out."
An instant later she was pounding up the stairs to the top floor. The door of the hall bedroom was ajar, and, pushing it open, she walked in. For a moment she stood there, her sharp eyes taking in every detail of the miserable place. The scantily covered bed showed signs of having been sat upon, but that was nothing unusual. Most of Mrs. Kerr's lodgers found the bed more comfortable than the straight, hard chair she supplied. The woman noticed something else, however, which brought a swift frown to her face, and made her step quickly forward, and jerk up the cornhusk mattress.
"He's been hiding something away here," she snapped aloud, peering closely at the rusty springs. "I knowed it! What a fool I was not to look before! but who'd 'a' thought it, after the times I've went through his——"
She broke off with a queer, choking sound, and in a second every trace of color had left her face. For a moment she stood as if turned to stone, staring at the floor with a look of utter incredulity in her narrowed eyes. Then, with a guttural sound, half groan, half exclamation of joy, she dropped on her knees and snatched up a crisp twenty-dollar bill that lay under the bed.