Ex-convicts -- Fiction; Love stories; New York (N.Y.) -- Social conditions -- Fiction; Self-sacrifice -- Fiction
David looked with dismay down on the tense face the light from
shop-windows revealed to him. He saw that she had to be answered with
facts or blank refusals, and he studied for a moment how much of the
first he could give her.
"Except for one glimpse of her in the street I haven't seen her for five
years--" he was beginning guardedly, when she broke in with,
"That was just before you were sent away?"
"Yes."
Like a flash came her next question. "And it was for her you stole the
money? She got the five thousand dollars?"
He was fairly staggered. "I cannot say," he returned.
She quickly moved a step ahead, and looked straight up into his face.
"A-a-h!" she breathed. "So that's it!"
"I tell you that, except for a mere glimpse the other day, I never saw
her but once before in my life; and that before that time I had never
even heard the name; and that, since then, I had never heard of her or
seen her till to-day."
Her gaze fairly pierced to his inner self. "You wouldn't lie to me--I
know that," she said abruptly. "But she's got some hold on you; she
means something in your life--don't she?"
"I've told you all I can tell you," David answered firmly.
She exploded. "I hate her! You hear me?--I hate her!"
He did not answer, and they walked on to the eastward in silence,
through streets effervescent with playing children. In Tompkin's Square
they sat down on one of the benches which edged both sides of the
curving walks and which were filled with husbands, wives, lovers, German
and Jewish and Magyar, who had come out for an hour or two of the soft
October air. David tried to draw Kate into casual conversation, but she
remained silent, and soon they rose and walked on. After several blocks
the window of a delicatessen store showed him she was more composed,
and he again offered her his arm. She now took it.
Presently they saw the gleam of water at the end of the street, and
continuing they came out upon a dock. It was crowded with trucks, and
against its one side creakingly rubbed a scow loaded with ashes and
against its other a scow ridged high with empty tin cans. Sitting in the
tails of some of the trucks were parlourless lovers--their courtship
flanked by garbage, presided over by the odour of stables. They did not
break their embraces as David and Kate brushed by them and passed on to
the end of the dock.
Kate sank upon the heavy end timber and gazed at the surging tide-river
that swept along under the moonlight. It came to David, who leaned
against a snubbing-post at her side, that this was the very dock on
which he had stood on New Year's eve; and half his mind was thinking of
the hopelessness of that night and of the bitter days preceding it, when
a whispered "David" reached up to him.
He glanced down. The moon, which dropped full into her face, revealed no
hardness--showed appealing eyes and a mouth that rippled at its corners.
"What is it?" he asked.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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