l; an' then it comes
over me like a blackness on everything that her chance is gone. Look at
that one by her. Ain't he a rough? Ain't he just fit for the Rogues'
Gallery, an' nowhere else? And yet--Well, it's a long story, an' you
won't want to hear it all."

"Every word," I said. "For once, we are all alone, and the rain pours
down so nobody is likely to interrupt. Such a face as that could hardly
help having a story, and a strange one."

"The most of it happens often enough, but I'll tell you. You think it's
pretty, but that black an' white thing doesn't tell much. If you could
once have looked at her, you'd have wanted to do something, same as
'most everybody did when the time for doin' was over. Let me get my bit
of work, an' then I'll tell you."

It was in the "McAuley Mission-parlor." The street below, cleared by the
pouring rain, was comparatively silent, though now and then a sailor
swung by unmindful of wet, or the sound of a banjo came from the
tenement-houses opposite. Below us, in the chapel, the janitor scrubbed
vigorously to the tune which seems for some unknown reason to be always
a powerful motive-power,

"I'm goin' home, no more to roam,"

the brush coming down with a whack at each measure. In my hands was the
mission album, a motley collection of faces, as devoid of Nature or any
clew to the real characteristics of the owners as the average photograph
usually is, but here and there one with a suggestion of interest and, in
this special case, of beauty--a delicate, pensive face, with a mass of
floating hair, deep, dark eyes, and exquisite curves in cheek and lip
and chin--the face of some gently born and nurtured maiden, looking
dreamily out upon a world which thus far, at least, could have shown her
only its tender, never its cruel or unfriendly, side, and not, as its
place would indicate, that of one who had somehow and at some strange
time found a home in these slums. Beauty of a vulgar, striking sort is
common enough there--vivid coloring, even a sparkle and light poverty
has had no power to kill--but this face had no share in such dower, and
the dark, soft eyes had a compelling power which made mine search them
for their secret,--not theirs, after all, it might prove, but only a
gift from some remote ancestor, who could transmit outline, and even
expression, but not the soul that had made them.

Mrs. McAuley slipped the picture from its place as she sat down by me
again. "I ought to have