Its inmate lay covered to the cheek, but one could catch a glimpse of tangled black hair and a swarthy skin. Patsy rose and went softly over to the bed; her movement disturbed the woman, who opened dumb, reproachful eyes.
“I’ll be gone in a minute, dear; I want just to tell you how sorry I am. But—sure—Mother Mary has it safe—and she’s keeping it for ye.” She stooped and brushed the forehead with her lips, as the staff and two of the nurses appeared.
“Faith! is it a delegation or a constabulary?” And Patsy laughed the laugh that had made her famous from Dublin to Duluth, where the bankruptcy had occurred.
“It’s a self-appointed committee to find out just where you’re going after you leave here,” said the young doctor.
Patsy eyed him quizzically. “That’s not manners to ask personal questions. But I don’t mind telling ye all, confidentially, that I haven’t my mind made yet between—a reception at the Vincent Wanderlusts’—or a musicale at the Ritz-Carlton.”
“Look here, lassie”—the old doctor ruffled his beard and threw out his chest like a mammoth pouter pigeon—“you’ll have to give us a sensible answer before we let you go one step. You know you can’t expect to get very far with that—in this city,” and he tapped the bag on her wrist significantly.
Patsy flushed crimson. For the first time in her life, to her knowledge, the world had discovered more about her than she had intended. Those humiliating eight dollars, seventy-six cents, and the crooked sixpence seemed to be scorching their way through the leather that held them. But she met the eyes looking into hers with a flinty resistance.
“Sure, ’twould carry me a long way, I’m thinking, if I spent it by the ha’penny bit.” Then she laughed in spite of herself. “If ye don’t look for all the world like a parcel of old mother hens that have just hatched out a brood o’ wild turkeys!” She suddenly checked her Irish—it was apt to lead her into compromising situations with Anglo-Saxon folk, if she did not leash her tongue—and slid into English. “You see, I really know quite a number of people here—rather well—too.”
“Why haven’t they come to see you, then?” asked the day nurse, bluntly.