"Anne," he said gaily, "here’s the two thousand. Count it." The sheafs of new bills pinned to their paper bands lay in her lap for a long time before she touched them. Even then she merely lifted one packet and let it drop without even looking at it. So Grismer folded the bills and put them into her reticule. Then he took her slim left hand in both of his and held it while they rode on in silence through the electric glare of the metropolis. At the station he dismissed the taxicab, bought a ticket and sleeping-car accommodations to Hudson—managed to get a state-room for her all to herself. "You won’t sleep much," he remarked, smiling, "so we’ll have to provide you with amusement, Anne." Carrying his suitcase, the girl walking beside him, he walked across the great rotunda to the newsstand. There, and at the confectionery counter opposite, he purchased food for mind and body—light food suitable for a young and badly bruised mind, and for a soul in embryo, still in the making. Then he went over to another window and bought a ticket for himself to Pittsfield, and sleeping accommodations. "We travel by different lines, Anne," he said, opening his portfolio and placing his own tickets in it, where several letters lay addressed to him at his basement studio. Then he replaced the portfolio in his breast pocket. "I’ll go with you to your train," he said, declining with a shake of his head the offices of a red-capped porter. "Your train leaves at 12.10 and we have only a few minutes." They walked together through the gates, the officials permitting him to accompany her. The train stood on the right—a very long train, and they had a long distance to walk along the concrete platform before they found her car. A porter showed them to her stateroom. Grismer tipped him generously: "Be very attentive to this young lady," he said, "and see that she has every service required, and that she is notified in plenty of time to get off at Hudson. Now you may leave us until we ring." He turned from the corridor and entered the stateroom, closing the door behind him. The girl sat on the sofa, very pale, with a dazed expression in her eyes. He seated himself beside her and drew her hands into his own. "Let me tell you something," he said cheerfully. "Everybody makes mistakes. You’ve made some; so have I; so has everybody I ever heard of. "Everybody gets in wrong at one time or another. The idea is to get out again and make a fresh start.... Will you try?" She nodded, so close to tears that she could not speak. "Promise me you’ll make a hard fight to travel straight?" "Y-yes." "It won’t be easy. But try to win out, Anne. Back there—in those streets and alleys—there’s nothing to hope for except death. You’ll find it if you ever go back—in some hospital, in some saloon-brawl, in some rooming-house—it will surely, surely find you by bullet, by knife, by disease—sooner or later it will find you unless you start to search for it yourself."