Part 28 (2/2)

”You will be my friend, won't you? You won't go back on me, will you?”

She could scarcely have begged for her life with more earnestness.

”I am very fond of you,” Mrs. Toomey evaded. She did not look at her.

Kate regarded her steadily. Laying down the hand she had taken she asked quietly:

”Will you tell me something truthfully, Mrs. Toomey?”

Mrs. Toomey's mind, ratlike, scuttled hither and thither, wondering what was coming.

”If I can,” uneasily.

Kate laid her hand upon the older woman's shoulder and searched her face:

”Is my friends.h.i.+p an embarra.s.sment to you?”

Mrs. Toomey squirmed.

”Tell me! The truth! You owe that to me!” Kate cried fiercely, her grip tightening on the woman's shoulder.

As Mrs. Toomey was a coward, so was she a petty liar by instinct. Her first impulse when in an uncomfortable position was to extricate herself by any plausible lie that occurred to her. But Kate's voice and manner were too compelling, her eyes too penetrating, to admit of falsifying or even evading further. Then, too, she had a wild panicky feeling that she might as well tell the truth and have it over--though it was the last thing in the world she had contemplated doing.

”It is--rather.”

”Why?” Her voice sounded guttural.

Like a hypnotic subject Mrs. Toomey heard herself whimpering:

”People will talk about it--Mrs. Pantin has warned me--and I'll--I'll get left out of everything, and--and when j.a.p gets into something it will hurt us in our business.”

Kate got up from her knees; involuntarily Mrs. Toomey did likewise.

The girl did not speak but folded her arms and looked at her ”friend.”

Mrs. Toomey had the physical sensation of shrivelling: as though she were standing naked before the withering heat of a blast furnace.

In the silence that seemed interminable, Kate's eyes moved from her head to her shabby shoes and back again, slowly, as though she wished to impress her appearance upon her memory, to the minutest detail.

As by divination, Mrs. Toomey saw herself as Kate saw her. Stripped of the virtues in which the girl had clothed her, she stood forth a scheming, inconsequential little coward in a weak ineffectual rack of a body--not strong enough to be vicious, without the courage to be dangerous. Thin-lipped, neutral-tinted, flat of chest and scrawny, without a womanly charm save the fragility that incited pity; to Kate who had idealized her she now seemed a stranger.

Kate completed her scrutiny, and searched her mind for the word which best expressed the result of it. Her lip curled unconsciously when she found it. She said with deliberate scathing emphasis:

”You--Judas Iscariot!”

Then she walked out, feeling that the very earth had given way beneath her.

Nothing was definite, nothing tangible or certain; there was not anybody or anything in the world, apparently, that one could count on. She had a feeling of nausea along with a curious calm that was like the calm of desperation. Yet her mind was alert, active, and she understood Mrs.

Toomey with an uncanny clearness. She believed her when she had said that she liked her, just as she knew that she had lied when she had said that she was glad to see her. She understood now that Mrs. Toomey had accepted the loan hoping to carry water on both shoulders, and finding herself unable to do so, had eased herself of the burden which required the least courage. The perspicacity of years of experience seemed to come to Kate in a few minutes, so surely did she follow Mrs. Toomey's motives and reasoning.

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