She looked up at him with tears in her eyes. “You're good.”
A lump rose in his heart. He thought of those evenings before the grate alone with her and of the desperate fight he had had with his passions. Good! He accused himself bitterly for the harm that he had done her. But before her his smile was bright and cheerful.
“We're all going to be so good to you that you'll not know us. Haven't we been waiting two months for a chance to spoil you?”
“Do you... know?” she whispered, color for an instant in her wan face.
“I know things aren't half so bad as they seem to you. Dear girl, we are your friends. We've not done right by you. Even your mother has been careless and let you get hurt. But we're going to make it up to you now.”
A man on the other side of the street watched Jeff come down and cross to the drug store. Billie Gray, ballot box stuffer, detective, and general handy man for Big Tim O'Brien, had been lurking in that entry when Jeff came home. He had sneaked up the stairs after them and had seen the editor disappear into his rooms with one whom he took to be a woman of the street. Already a second plain clothes man was doing sentry duty. The policeman whose beat it was sat in the drug store and kept an eye open from that quarter.
To the officer Jeff nodded casually. “Bad weather to be out all night in, Nolan.”
“Right you are, Mr. Farnum.”
The editor ordered a bottle of whiskey and while it was being put up passed into the telephone booth and closed the door behind him. He called up Olive 431.
Central rang again and again.