“A mighty poor thing to depend on, lying drunk on the side-walk at midday. Don’t you waste your pity on the likes of him.” The old man knew that he would have been grievously disappointed if his pretty young lady with the sweet blue eyes had gone on her way and left a fellow creature to freeze to death.
“It may be hours before a policeman passes this way,” Ada said. “It’s sheer murder to leave him. I will run down this side street and see if I can find a cab.” The old man waited for the girl’s return, walking up and down the side-walk where the drunken man lay in an unconscious sleep. Soon he heard the sound of sleigh-bells, and in another instant one appeared round the corner with Ada seated in it. She jumped out when she reached the spot where the man lay, and told the hackman to get down and lift him into the cab. “Take him to the nearest police-station,” she said, “and keep him there until he is himself again.”
“And who’s going to pay me?” the man asked sullenly.
“I will,” Ada replied proudly, “if you do not care to do it for charity.”
“If I was plying round the city looking out for driving acts of charity, I guess my wife and young ’uns would be as badly off as these drunken brutes are.”
Ada took her thin little purse from her pocket. “Will you do it for a dollar?” she said; “it is all I have to give you. Will you help the hackman to lift him in,” she said, turning to the old man. But as she looked at his shrivelled old figure, in his badly-fitting clothes, she seemed to regret what she had said, and stooped down to take the man by the shoulders, while the hackman took his feet; but the old man quickly put her aside, with almost a cry in his cracked old voice, as he said, “Don’t touch him, don’t touch him. To think of you defiling your pretty fingers on a drunken brute.”
Ada looked at him in mild surprise, and gave up her place. When the hackman drove off she turned and thanked the old man.
“If the friendless and poor aren’t kind to each other,” she said sadly, “where can we look for help?” She thought that he did not understand that she was placing herself amongst the list of the poor and friendless. She, his daintily-reared lady, standing there, a slight, proud figure, with her queenly little head thrown back, and her cheeks as delicate as the pink apple-blossom in his old garden at home. In all the big city of New York where he had worked and toiled for forty years, this girl was the one glad and beautiful thing for him; he felt his time-worn heart beat young again when he looked at her.
(To be concluded.)