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I called myself savage names as I chafed her hands and did all the foolish, futile things that distracted humans think of at such times, wondering, meanwhile, if I had been quite mad to discern a resemblance between this simple, clear-eyed gentle German woman, and the battered, ragged, swaying figure that had stood at the judge's bench. Suddenly Alma Pflugel opened her eyes.
When I had succeeded in finding the nearest drug store I spent a wild ten minutes telephoning the surprised little probation officer, then Frau Nirlanger, and finally Blackie, for no particular reason. I shrieked my story over the wire in disconnected, incoherent sentences. Then I rushed back to the little cottage where Alma Pflugel and I waited with what patience we could summon.
"So," said Alma Pflugel at last, and rose and walked slowly to the window and stood looking out at the wind-swept garden. That window, with its many tiny panes, once had looked out across a wilderness, with an Indian camp not far away.
She entered the room in silence, and no one could have recognized in this pretty, fragile creature the pitiful wreck of the juvenile court. And when Alma Pflugel saw the face of the little sister the poor, marred, stricken face her own face became terrible in its agony.
Half an hour later I stood before the cottage, set primly in the center of a great lot that extended for half a square on all sides. A winter-sodden, bare enough sight it was in the gray of that March day. But it was not long before Alma Pflugel, standing in the midst of it, the March winds flapping her neat skirts about her ankles, filled it with a blaze of color.
They came up the path to the door, and there the little sister turned the knob, and it yielded under her fingers, and the old door swung open; and so she entered the house quite as Alma Pflugel had planned she should, except that the roses were not blooming along the edge of the sunken brick walk.
I sank into the depths of a huge rocker that must have been built for Grosspapa Pflugel's generous curves. Alma Pflugel, in a chair opposite, politely waited for this new process of interviewing to begin, but relaxed in the embrace of that great armchair I suddenly realized that I was very tired and hungry, and talk-weary, and that here; was a great peace.
Then there was the old horn lantern that Jacob Pflugel had used a century before, and in one corner of the sitting-room stood Grossmutter Pflugel's spinning-wheel. Behind cupboard doors were ranged the carefully preserved blue-and-white china dishes, and on the shelf below stood the clumsy earthen set that Grosspapa Pflugel himself had modeled for his young bride in those days of long ago.
And then as Alma Pflugel continued to stare, while the stunned bewilderment grew in her eyes, "Why, I have one-fourth interest in your own nephew this very minute. And his name is Bennie!" Whereupon Alma Pflugel fainted quietly away in the chilly little grape arbor, with her head on my shoulder.
Her hand went to her breast, to her throat, to her lips, with an odd, stifled gesture. "Do that again!" I cried, and shook Alma Pflugel sharply by the shoulder. "Do that again!" Her startled blue eyes looked into mine. "What do you mean?" she asked. "That that gesture. I've seen it somewhere that trick of pressing the hand to the breast, to the throat, to the lips Oh!" Suddenly I knew.
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