“I don't know, mother.”
Then Mrs. Anderson's face suddenly resumed its old, reproachful expression. “Well, I don't care if there has,” said she. She whispered, but her voice was intense. “I don't care if there has. I don't care if he is in state-prison. That child has got to caring about you, and you ought to—”
Anderson turned and looked at his mother, and her severe face softened and paled. He looked to her at that moment more like his father than himself. He was accusing her.
“Mother, do you think, if she cares, that I would ever desert her, any more than father would have deserted you?” he demanded.
It was her turn to excuse herself. “I know you are honorable, Randolph,” she said, “but I saw when I came in, and I don't see how you have seen enough of her to have it happen; but I know girls, and I can see how she feels, and I didn't know but you might think if her father—”
“What difference do you think her father makes to me, mother?” asked Anderson.
Chapter XL
When Carroll came to himself that night after his fall, his first conscious motion was for his dollar watch. He was in William Allbright's bed. There were only two sleeping-apartments in the little tenement. William was seated beside him, watching him with his faithful, serious face; there was also a physician, keenly observant, still closer to the injured man's head; and the sister, Allbright's sister, was visible in the next room, seated in a chair which commanded a good view of the bed. It was Allbright who had rescued Carroll from the station-house; for when he did not rise, the usual crowd, who directly attribute all failures to recover one's self from a manifestly inappropriate recumbent position, had collected, and several policemen were on the scene.
“I know this gentleman,” Allbright said, in his rather humble, still half-respectful, voice, which carried conviction. “I know this gentleman. I have been a book-keeper in his office. He slipped on the ice. I saw him fall. He is not drunk.”
One of the policemen, who had been long in the vicinity and knew Allbright, as from the heights of the law one might know an unimportant and unoffending citizen, responded.