“And where are you going to take me?”

“To one or two pawn-shops around here.”

“Well, I’m not going with you.  If I go anywhere it will be up to Rosenthal’s.  I’m getting worried.  It’s after three o’clock now.  She’s got no money to get anything to eat.  She’ll come home dead beat out if she’s been hungry all this time.”

“Well, it’s right on the way.  We’ll take in a few of the small shops, and then we’ll keep on up.  There are two on Second Avenue, and then there’s Blobbs’s, one of the biggest around here.  The old woman gets a lot of that kind of stuff and she’ll open up when she finds out who wants to know.  I’ve done business with her—­where does this fellow, Dalton, live?”

“Up on the East Side.”

“Well, then, we are all right.  He will make for some fence where he is not known.  Come along.”

Martha hesitated for an instant, abandoned her decision, and retied her bonnet-strings; she might find her mistress the quicker if she acceded to his request.  She stepped to the stove, examined the fire to see that it was all right, added a shovel of coal and, with Pickert at her heels, groped her way down the dingy stairs, her fingers following the handrail.  In the front hall she stopped to say to the janitress that she was going to Rosenthal’s and to tell Mrs. Stanton, when she came, that she was not to leave the apartment again, as Mr. Carlin was coming to see her.

When they reached the corner of the next block, Pickert halted outside a small loan-office, told her to wait, and disappeared inside, only to emerge five minutes later and continue his walk with her up-town.  The performance was repeated twice, his last stop being in front of a gold sign notifying the indigent and the guilty that one Blobbs bought, sold, and exchanged various articles of wearing-apparel for cash or its equivalent.

Martha eyed the cluster of balls suspended above the door, and occupied herself with a cursory examination of the contents of the front window, to none of which, she said to herself, would she have given house-room had the choice of the whole collection been offered her.  She was about to march into the shop and end the protracted interview when Pickert flung himself out.

“I’m on—­got him down fine!  Listen—­see if I’ve got this right!  He wore a black cape-coat buttoned up close-that’s what you told me, wasn’t it?—­and a kind of a slouch-hat.  Been an up-town swell before he got down and out?  That kind of a man, ain’t he?  Smooth-shaven, with a droop in his eye—­speaks like a foreigner—­English.  Somethin’ doin’!—­Do you know a man named Kling who keeps an old-furniture store up on Fourth Avenue?”

“No, I don’t know Kling and I don’t want to know him.  It will be dark, and Rosenthal’s ’ll be shut up if I keep up this foolishness, and I’m going to find my mistress.  If you can’t find Dalton, I will, when my brother Stephen comes.  Now you go your way and I’ll go mine.”