"Well, you are up against it good and hard," she said slowly. There was sympathy in her voice.
The sympathy startled him; he warmed to her. But straightway it entered his mind that she would hasten to spread her discovery, and to live in the house might then be to live amid insult.
"You have committed burglary on my mind—you have stolen my secret," he said sharply.
"Oh, but I'll never tell," she quickly returned. And David, looking at her clear face, found himself believing her.
She tried with quick questions to break into his past, but he blocked her with silence. After a time she glanced at a watch upon her breast, rose and reached for the door-knob. But David sprang quickly forward. "Allow me," he said, and opened the door for her.
The courtesy did not go unnoticed. "You must have been a real 'gun,' a regular high-flyer, in your good days," she whispered.
"Why?"
"Oh, your kind of manners don't grow on cheap crooks."
She held out her hand. "Well, I wish you luck. Come over and see me sometime. Good night."
When he had closed the door David sat down and fell to musing over his visitor. She was dressed rather too showily, but she was not coarse. She was bold, but not brazen; hers seemed the boldness, the directness, of a child or a savage. Perhaps, in this quality, she was not grown up, or not yet civilised. He wondered how a maid or a nurse girl could support a father on her earnings, as he inferred she did. He wondered how she had so quickly divined that he was fresh from prison. He remembered a yellow stain near the ends of the first two fingers of her left hand; cigarettes; and the stain made him wonder, too. And he wondered at her manner—sharp, no whit of coquetry, a touch of frank good fellow-ship at the last.