“An’ ye ain’t had a soul in that room but yerself since ye’ve been here?  Is that true?”

Again Felix nodded.

“Of course it’s true, whether ye say it or not.  What a fool I was to ask ye!  I got it now.  That sleeve-link belongs to a poor creature who slept in that room three or four days before ye come and skipped the next morning.”

Felix’s fingers tightened on the arm of the chair.  For the moment it seemed to him as if he were swaying with the room.  “Some one you were kind to, I suppose,” he said, lifting a hand to shade his face, the words coming one at a time, every muscle in his body taut.

“What else could we do?  Leave the poor thing out in the cold and wet?”

“It was, then, some one you picked up, was it not?” The room had stopped swaying and he was beginning to breathe evenly again.  He saw that he had not betrayed himself.  Her calm proved it; and so did the infinite pity that crept into her tones as she related the incident.

“No, some one Tom McGinniss picked up on his beat, or would have picked up hadn’t John and I come along.  And that wet she was, and everything streamin’ puddles, an’ she, poor dear, draggled like a dog in the gutter.”

Felix’s sheltering hand sagged suddenly, exposing for a moment his strained face and wide-open eyes.

“I didn’t understand it was a woman,” he stammered, turning his head still farther from the light of the lamp.

“Yes, of course, it was a woman, and a lady, too.  That’s what I’ve been a-tellin’ ye.  Here, take my seat if that light gets into your eyes.  I see it’s botherin’ ye.  It’s that red shade that does it.  It sets John half crazy sometimes.  I’ll turn it down.  Well, that’s better.  Yes, a lady.  An’ she wet as a rat an’ all the heart out of her.  An’ that link ye got in yer hand is hers and nobody else’s.  John and I had been to evening service at St. Barnabas’s, an’ we hung on behind till everybody had gone so as to have a word with Father Cruse, after he had taken off his vestments.  We bid him good night, come out of the 29th Street door, and kept on toward Lexington Avenue.  We hadn’t gone but a little way from the church, when John, who was walking ahead, come up agin Tom McGinniss.  He was stooping over a woman huddled up on them big front steps before you get to the corner.

“‘What are you doin’, Tom?’ says John.

“‘It’s a drunk,’ he says, ‘an I’ll run her in an’ she’ll sleep it off and be all the better in the mornin’.’

“‘Let me take a look at her, Tom,’ says I; an’ I got close to her breath and there was no more liquor inside her than there is in me this minute.

“‘You’ll do nothin’ of the kind, Tom McGinniss,’ says I.  ’This poor thing is beat out with cold and hunger.  Give her to me.  I’ll take her home.  Get hold of her, John, an’ lift her up.’