“You kept faith, didn’t you, dear?” she whispered to him. “Oh, but you kept faith with her––right––right up to the end. Please God––please God, I may get my chance back again––to try to keep it, too. You’ve gone to her––and––and I’m glad! You waited a long time, dear, and you were very patient. But, oh, you’ve left me––you’ve left me all alone!”
The tears came then. Great, searing drops that had been hopelessly dammed back the night before rolled down her thin cheeks. She stooped and touched the silvered head with her lips before she groped her way into the other room and found her chair at the table.
“He knew I was there with him,” she tried to 165 whisper. “He knew I was, I know! But I wish I could tell him I’m sorry. Oh, I wish I could!”
And Old Jerry found her so, head pillowed upon her outstretched arms, her hair in a marvelous shimmering mass across her little shoulders when he came the next morning, almost before the day was fairly begun, to tell her all the things there were for him to tell.
CHAPTER XII
Monday morning was always a busy morning in Jesse Hogarty’s Fourteenth Street gymnasium; busy, that is to say, along about that hour when morning was almost ready to slip into early afternoon. The reason for this late activity was very easy to understand, too, once one realized that Hogarty’s clientele––especially that of his Monday mornings––was composed quite entirely of that type of leisurely young man who rarely pointed the nose of his tub-seated raceabout below Forty-second Street, except for the benefits of a few rather desultory rounds under Hogarty’s tutelage, a shocking plunge beneath an icy shower, and the all pervading sense of physical well-being resultant upon a half hour’s kneading of none too firm muscles on the marble slabs.
It was like Jesse Hogarty––or Flash Hogarty, as he had been styled by the sporting reporters of the saffron dailies ten years back, when it was said that he could hit faster and harder out of a clinch than any lightweight who ever stood in canvas shoes––to refuse to transfer his place to some locality a bit nearer Fifty-seventh Street, even when it chanced, 167 as it did with every passing year, that he drew his patrons––at an alarmingly high rate per patron––almost entirely from far uptown.
“This isn’t a turkish bath,” Flash Hogarty was accustomed to answer such importunities. “If you are just looking for a place to boil out the poison, hunt around a little––take a wide-eyed look or two! There are lots and lots of them. This isn’t a turkish bath; it’s a gymnasium––a man’s gymnasium!”