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"All right, I'll throw her in," cried the desperate auctioneer. "What am I bid for this here afternoon costume complete with lady." "Twenty-seven fifty," said a woman whom three years of banting would still have left too fat to get into it. "Twenty-eight," whispered the first bidder. "Thirty," said John Sedyard.
With wrath in his eye, he shouldered aside Sedyard and the cabman, grabbed the smart youth, whose turn at persuasion was then on, and threw him into the face of the crowd. "Oh! but you're the villyans," he admonished them, and then addressed the captive maid in reassuring tones. "You're all right, Miss, now. You're no longer defenceless in this wicked city.
There was some other desultory bidding but in a few moments Sedyard found himself minus fifty-four dollars and plus a chiffon gown and muff, a hat all drooping plumes and a graceful female form, golden-haired, bewitching, with a smile sweetly blended of surprise, incipient idiocy and allure. "She's a queen all right, all right," the sophisticated youth cheered him.
I can attend to the case if you leave it to me." "Like you," said John shortly. "Who told you she is a 'case. Mother," he went on addressing that gentle knitter by the fire, "I want you to come downstairs." "She shall do nothing of the kind!" cried Edith, and as Mrs. Sedyard looked interrogatively from one to another of her children, her daughter swept on.
She looked so unspeakable in that attitude that the cabman felt called upon to offer a little professional advice: "She needs a checkrein," he declared, "an' she needs it bad," a remark which so incensed Patrolman McDonogh that Sedyard decided to explain: "Just disperse those people, will you," said he, "I want to talk to you."
"Why that's," he began to explain, but young Trevor had vanished into the crowd. Presently the cab with the smart youth inside drew up to the curb and Sedyard, with a new self-consciousness, put his arm around the blue figure and trundled her across the sidewalk. The cabman threw his rug across his horse's quarters and lumbered down to assist at the embarkation of so fair a passenger.
"This case," said the noble Patrolman McDonogh with unpunctual inspiration, "had ought to be looked into by rights." "Chauffeur," said John Sedyard to the shadowy form before him, "just pick out the darkest streets, will you?" "Yes, sir," answered the chauffeur looking up into the bland smile and the outstretched hand above him. "I'll make it if I can but if we get stopped, don't blame me."
Edith declines to receive this helpless child. Therefore, I have offered her the shelter of my roof." "His roof," explained Mary to Mrs. Sedyard, "is the floor of the hall bedroom above his. It measures about nine by six. So the thing to do, since of course, Dick is only talking nonsense, is to let me take the girl around to the studio until John and I can plan an uninstitutional future for her."
"Alas! poor child," sighed John, looking out into the night. "She'll be there soon." "What is she going out for at this time?" Mary demanded. "I quite thought that she, too, had come to dinner. Who is she, Mrs. Sedyard?" Upon her mother's helpless silence, Edith broke in with the story as she felt she knew it. Union Square, the discharged shopgirl, John's quixotic conduct.
John Sedyard had a habit of succeeding in all he set forth to do but the complete and surprising success which attended him in this quest was a notch above even his high average.
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