“Mr. Ralston”—Tom started, and she saw his grasp tighten on the iron rail of the bed, “I have come to take you away from this place. I shall send for the bail commissioner at once” (she had learned her lesson well, poor child!), “so that you can catch the two o’clock train. No!” she went on quickly, checking him with a gesture as he was about to speak, “you mustn’t stay here another night, nor another hour. It would kill your father if he knew it, and we couldn’t answer his questions to-night.”
The strong man bowed his head again, without a word. She hesitated an instant, then left him, and walked across the floor and up the stone stairway with a firm step. Tom looked after her wistfully, but she did not even glance toward his cell. Within half an hour he was sent for, and found Charity, with the commissioner and the sergeant, sitting behind the rail, in the room above. The bail was quickly arranged, the officer handed over a jack-knife and a few coppers he had taken from Tom’s pockets the night before, and told him he could go where he pleased until nine o’clock the next morning, when the court opened.
There was a constrained silence for a moment in the little office. At last Tom raised his eyes, with a look in them half questioning, half appealing, to the girl’s white face, at the same time involuntarily extending his hand toward her. For the first time in his life he found no response in the brown eyes, staring stonily out of the barred windows.
His hand slowly dropped to his side. With a dazed look he turned first to the officers, then to Charity, as if he did not understand. Still there was no response in the brown eyes, staring stonily out of the barred windows. Still Tom stood there helplessly, not quite understanding it all. Glancing at his stained and rumpled clothes he brushed them a little, mechanically, passed his hand over his forehead once or twice, then turned humbly toward the door, passed out bareheaded and was gone.
How Charity found her way home she never knew. When she entered her own little chamber at dusk and buried her aching head in her pillow, she had a vague recollection of wandering about the gay city streets for hours, of finally seeking the railroad station, of cooling her hot forehead against the frosty pane of the car, and watching the snowflakes that came faster and faster from the darkening sky. Tom had come home, the station-master had told her carelessly, and that was all she cared to know.
How he endured the ignominy of appearing and paying his fine in the municipal court the next day, she did not ask; nor did she even see him for a week. After the excitement of that gloomy Christmas came, with the reaction, a complete nervous exhaustion, which mercifully spared her the torture of questioning eyes and tongues until beyond New Year’s—that should have been her wedding-day.
Meanwhile she wavered irresolutely between one and another course of action. Now she felt she must cry out to him to forgive her own cruel hardness in his time of trouble; now the Puritan blood she had inherited asserted itself, and her face grew hard again as she thought of his weakness.
The meeting could be put off no longer. It came, and in the same dear old kitchen where they had worked together. The man looked straight into her eyes and said, quietly: