Emily entered the small side room which completed Mrs. Riley's suite.
"There's the blacking-box. Bought it himself with his own savings."
"But he was too changeable. I should think he would have done better to stick to one thing."
"That's what I told him. But you know how a boy is fickle-minded. 'Get me something good, mother,' says he. There's the little cradle I rocked him in that I kept all these years—" Emily herself could hardly check her tears at thought of the mother rocking this empty memento.
"His Aunt Mary gave it to me—not that we couldn't afford it—plenty and to spare I had when my husband was alive, but it wasn't lucky to buy a cradle for your first baby, she said, and so I rocked them all in hers, and now six of them are in heaven with their father, God ha' mercy, and Walter, all that was left me, is in the lockup this night with the bad people."
Walter's little room was bare but not squalid. A knockabout suit hung on pegs at one side, and a washbowl stood on a cheap commode, like a prophecy of cleanliness in the occupant.
"Don't worry, Mrs. Riley. Since I helped Walter into this scrape, I am bound to help him out of it."
"Heaven bless you, if you can save my Walter—and I know you would try if you knew him. The lovingest boy, full of mischief like his father, but he'd give the blood out of his heart to a soul in trouble. Oh, well I knew he had something on his mind all these weeks. For he wouldn't run up stairs two steps at a time, as he used to, and whistle so that it was sweeter and louder than a cage full of canaries. When I heard him whistle low I knew it was something troubling his mind. 'Yes, mother, it is,' says he, but that was all I could get out of him."
"Suppose I bring a very great lawyer to be his counsel," said Emily, deeply moved by the lonely mother's sorrow, and haunted, too, by a dim remembrance of the central face among the three gamins—a frank boy-face, with red lips and cheeks. "Wouldn't he stand a better chance of getting off?"
"Just as you say, Miss Barlow," answered the sad woman, brightening a little.