"She is ill, m'sieur, very ill, and she is alone. There is no one but me now. My brother--he is dead. It is for her that I have done--this--this thing to-night. If I do not return to her--if you do not let me go back--she will die, m'sieur. I tell you she will die." If she was acting it was good acting. Half convinced against his will of her sincerity, and half doubtfully, he came to a standstill. "Where do you live--is it far from here?" "It is in this street, m'sieur. It is not far." He could feel her arm quivering in the grip of his nippers. "Maybe I'm makin' a sucker of myself," he said dubiously, defining the diagnosis as much to himself as to her. "But if it ain't far I might walk you back there and give this here sister of yours the once-over. And then if you ain't lyin' we'll see----" "Must I go so?" She lifted her hand up, indicating her meaning. "You bet your life you're goin' that way or not at all. I'm takin' no more chances with you." "But it would kill her--she would die to see me so. She must not know I have done this thing, m'sieur. She must not see this----" The little chain rattled. "Come on," he ordered in a tone of finality. "I thought that sick sister gag was old stuff, but I was goin' to give you a show to make good----" "But I swear----" "Save your breath! Save your breath! Tell your spiel to the judge. Maybe he'll listen. I'm through." They were almost at the doors of the squat and ugly building which the Tenderloin calls Jeff Market when he noticed that her left hand was clutched against her breast. He remembered then she had held that hand so when she first spoke to him; except during her flight and the little struggle after he ran her down, she must have been holding it so all this time. "What's that you've got in your hand?" he demanded suspiciously, and with a practiced flip of the nipper handles swung her round so that she faced him. "It is my own, m'sieur. It is----" "Nix, nix with that. I gotta see. Open up them fingers." She opened her hand slowly, reluctantly. The two of them were in the shadow of the elevated structure then, close up alongside a pillar, and he had to peer close to see what the object might be. Having seen he did not offer to touch it, but he considered his prisoner closely, taking her in from her head to her feet, before he led her on across the roadway and the pavement and in at one of the doors of that odoursome clearing house of vice and misery, mercy and justice, where the night court sits seven nights a week. First, though, he untwisted the disciplinary little steel chain from about her wrist. The doorway by which they entered gave upon the Tenth Street face of the building and admitted them into a maze of smelly dim corridors and cross-halls in the old jail wing directly beneath the hideous and aborted tower, which in a neighbourhood of stark architectural offences makes of Jefferson Market courthouse a shrieking crime against good looks and good taste.