ed to do something with
them. She had tried to get them in with gingerbread and popcorn;
they came in fast enough for those; but they would not stay. They
were digging in the gutters and calling names; learning the foul
language of the places into which they were born; chasing and hiding
in alley-ways; filching, if they could, from shops; going off
begging with lies on their lips. It was terrible to see the springs
from which the life of the city depths was fed.

"If you could stop it _there_!" Luclarion said, and said with
reason.

"Will you let me go?" asked Hazel of her mother, in good earnest.

"'Twon't hurt her," put in Luclarion. "Nothing's catching that you
haven't got the seeds of in your own constitution. And so the
catching will be the other way."

The seeds of good,--to catch good; that was what Luclarion Grapp
believed in, in those dirty little souls,--no, those clean little
_souls_, overlaid with all outward mire and filth of body, clothing,
speech, and atmosphere, for a mile about; through which they could
no more grope and penetrate, to reach their own that was hidden from
them in the clearer life beyond, than we can grope and reach to
other stars.

"I will get Desire," quoth Hazel, inspired as she always was, both
ways.

Running in at the house in Greenley Street the next Thursday, she
ran against Uncle Titus coming out.

"What now?" he demanded.

"Desire," said Hazel. "I've come for her. We're wanted at
Luclarion's. We've got work to do."

"Humph! Work? What kind?"

"Play," said Hazel, laughing. She delighted to bother and mystify
Uncle Titus, and imagined that she did.

"I thought so. Tea parties?"

"Something like," said Hazel. "There are children down there that
don't know how to grow up. They haven't any comfortable sort of
fashion of growing up. Somebody has got to teach them. They don't
know how to play 'Grand Mufti,' and they never heard of 'King George
and his troops.' Luclarion tried to make them sit still and learn
letters; but of course they wouldn't a minute longer than the
gingerbread lasted, and they are eating her out of house and home.
It will take young folks, and week-days, you see; so Desire and I
are going." And Hazel ran up the great, flat-stepped staircase.

"Lives that have no business to be," said Uncle Titus to himself,
going down the brick walk. "The Lord has His own ways of bringing
lives together. And His own business gets worked out among them,
beyond the