So the whole thing had to be explained. Two men had appeared on the previous afternoon in Indiana Avenue, accusing Teddy of systematic robbery. Teddy had so far corroborated the charge that he had absented himself from home and work. He had called up once, nominally from Paterson, but the two detectives didn’t believe that it was. In any case, she had a little money of her own—her very own—two hundred and forty-five dollars it was—and as far as it would go she had come to make restitution. If it wasn’t enough, they would sell the house as soon as they could get it on the market and pay up the balance, if he would only give the order that Teddy shouldn’t be sent to jail. Emboldened by his concentration on her story and herself, she took out the roll of bills from her bag, enlarging on her plea. "You see, sir, it was this way. After my father had to leave the bank last fall, Teddy had to be our chief support, just on his eighteen a week. My two little sisters left school and went to work; but that didn’t bring in much. Then there were the taxes, and the mortgages, and the expenses of my father’s funeral, besides six of us having to eat—" "You were working, too, weren’t you?" "Yes, sir; I was posing. But I only earned six a week." "Only?" Based on a memory of his own of something Junia had said—"a mousey little thing with a veneer of modesty, but mercenary isn’t the word for her"—there was an implication in this "Only?" which escaped Jennie’s simplicity. "Yes, sir; that was all. Somehow I couldn’t get the work. Nobody seemed to want me." He pointed at her roll of bills. "Then where did you get the money you’re holding in your hand?" The question was unexpected and confounding. She must either answer it truly or not answer it at all. If she answered it truly, she not only exposed Bob, but she exposed herself to the utmost rigor of his wrath. She didn’t care about herself; she didn’t care much about Bob; she cared only about Teddy. The utmost rigor of this man’s wrath would send him to jail as easily as she could brush a fly through an open window. She could say nothing. She could only look at him helplessly, with lips parted, eyes shimmering, and the hot color flooding her face pitiably. It was the kind of situation in which no man with the heart of a man could be hard on any little girl; besides which, Collingham looked on this silent confession as providential. It would enable him to reason with Bob, if it ever came to that, and tell him what he, the father, knew at first hand and from his own experience. Otherwise he brought no moral judgment to bear on poor Jennie, and condemned her not at all. "Just wait a minute," he said, in a kindly tone, getting up as he spoke. "I’ll go and straighten the thing out."