"No, no, you're not that bad," said Miss Jennie earnestly, "but I do think—well you've not been under the withest of influenthes, have you?"
"I haven't had a chance," said Skippy desperately. "Everything has been against me. Guess no one cares what becomes of me."
"I know," said the gentle voice. "It ith hard."
"Look here, Miss Tupper," said Skippy, beginning to be convinced of his own predestination for the gallows, as he instinctively felt the sentimental value of the rôle. "Men like myself don't get a chance to know women like you. I wish to heaven—" He stopped, a lump in his throat, and gazed into the sentimental night. Great heavens, what a depraved character he really was! For the first time he saw himself in the enormity of his sinning. It was not only the cigarettes and the one black cigar, purloined from his father, but the orgies at penny-ante, the occasional game of craps back of Mather's barn. Then he remembered other damning episodes in his black record—the time he had gone into a mathematics exam and read the formulas from Buster Bean's collar; the night he had helped Sport McGinnis smuggle a bottle of beer in for a welsh rabbit and swallowed a full third of the rank stuff. Then there was an appalling record of evasions, turnings and twistings of the exact and literal truth—
"You can't be altogether bad if you're so honeth," said Miss Jennie, in whom the instinct was lively to bring the sinner home.
"I am. I am," said Skippy lugubriously.
"Can't I help—juth a little?"
"Would you, would you really?" he said eagerly.
"Let me—pleath."
The plump little fingers came forth and met the rough hand of the sinner. Skippy squeezed them convulsively, not daring to trust his voice, nodded twice and smiled bravely back in the moonlight to show that the leaven of higher things was already beginning to work.