“Well, what do you think I did after he’d gone?  I went and played a piece on the piano,—­and I never can bear to hear that ragtime to this day.  I couldn’t seem to feel anything.  And after a while I got up and opened the envelope—­it was full of crackly new hundred dollar bills —­thirty of ’em, and as I sat there staring at ’em the pain came on, like a toothache, in throbs, getting worse all the time until I just couldn’t stand it.  I had a notion of sending the money back even then, but I didn’t.  I didn’t know how to do it,—­and as I told you, I wasn’t able to care much.  Then I remembered I’d promised to go away, and I had to have some money for that, and if I didn’t leave right off I wouldn’t have the strength to do it.  I hadn’t even thought where to go:  I couldn’t think, so I got dressed and went down to the depot anyway.  It was one of those bright, bitter cold winter days after a thaw when the icicles are hanging everywhere.  I went inside and walked up and down that long platform under the glass roof.  My, it was cold in there!  I looked over all the signs, and made up my mind I’d go to Chicago.

“I meant to work, I never meant to spend the money, but to send it back.  I’d put it aside—­and then I’d go and take a little.  Say, it was easy not to work—­and I didn’t care what happened to me as long as I wasn’t going to see him again.  Well, I’m not trying to smooth it over, I suppose there was something crooked about me from the start, but I just went clean to hell with that money, and when I heard he’d gone away, I came back here.”

“Something crooked!” The words rang in Hodder’s ears, in his very soul.  How was he or any man to estimate, to unravel the justice from the injustice, to pass upon the merit of this woman’s punishment?  Here again, in this vitiated life, was only to be seen the remorseless working of law—­cause and effect.  Crooked!  Had not the tree been crooked from the beginning—­incapable of being straightened?  She had herself naively confessed it.  Was not the twist ingrained?  And if so, where was the salvation he had preached?  There was good in her still,—­but what was “good”? . . .  He took no account of his profound compassion.

What comfort could he give her, what hope could he hold out that the twist, now gnarled and knotted, might be removed, that she might gain peace of soul and body and the “happiness” of which he had talked with Alison Parr? . . .  He raised his eyes, to discover that the woman’s were fixed upon him, questioningly.

“I suppose I was a fool to tell you,” she said, with a shade of her old bitterness; “it can’t do any good.”  Her next remark was startlingly astute.  “You’ve found out for yourself, I guess, that all this talk about heaven and hell and repentance don’t amount to anything.  Hell couldn’t be any worse than I’ve been through, no matter how hot it is.  And heaven!” She laughed, burst into tears, and quickly dried them.  “You know the man I’ve been talking about, that bought me off.  I didn’t intend to tell you, but I see you can’t help knowing—­Eldon Parr.  I don’t say he didn’t do right from his way of looking at things,—­but say, it wasn’t exactly Christian, was it?”