by the
obscure and inevitable law of compensation, over against the gigantic
antagonism of things he found himself born into; and you knew, as you
looked at him, that he would, somehow, sooner or later, make his small
dint against the great dead wall of society that loomed itself in his
way; whether society or he should get the worst of it, might happen as
it would.

The younger was a little girl. A flower thrown down in the dirt. A jewel
encrusted with mean earth. Little feet in enormous coarse shoes, cracked
and trodden down; bare arms trying to hide themselves under a bit of old
woolen shawl; hair tangled beneath a squalid hood; out from amidst all,
a face of beauty that peeped, like an unconscious draft of God's own
signing, upon humanity. Was there none to acknowledge it?

An official came through the waiting room.

The boy showed a slink in his eyes, like one used to shoving and rebuff,
and to getting off, round corners. The girl stood, innocent and
unheeding.

"There! out with you! No vagrums here!"

Of course, they couldn't have all Queer Street in their waiting rooms,
these railway people; and the man's words were rougher than his voice.
But these were two children, who wanted cherishing!

The slink in the boy's eye worked down, and became a sneak and a
shuffle, toward the door. The girl was following.

"Stop!" called a woman's voice, sharp and authoritative. "Don't you stir
a single step, either of you, till you get warm! If there isn't any
other way to fix it, I'll buy you both a ticket somewhere and then
you'll be passengers."

It was a tall, thin, hoopless woman, with a carpetbag, a plaid shawl,
and an umbrella; and a bonnet that, since other bonnets had begun to
poke, looked like a chaise top flattened back at the first spring. In a
word, Mehitable Sampson.

Something twitched at the corners of the man's mouth as he glanced round
at this sudden and singular champion. Something may have twitched under
his comfortable waistcoat, also. At any rate, he passed on; and the
children--the brief battledore over in which they had been the
shuttlecocks--crept back, compliant with the second order, much amazed,
toward the stove.

Miss Sampson began to interrogate.

"Why don't you take your little sister home?"

"This one ain't my sister." Children always set people right before they
answer queries.

"Well--whoever she is, then. Why don't you both go home?"

"'Cause it's cold there, too. And we was