te for a baby?" demanded Mrs. Moriarty, when
the Stork's carelessness had been explained to her. "Aren't you and your
father and me happy enough in this grand new house without a baby to be
botherin' us?"

Unconsciously she had touched the root of Esther's trouble.

"I needs a baby," she wailed, "the whiles my papa he ain't lovin' no
more mit me. And I wants somebody shall love me."

[Illustration: "What you think we got to our house?"]

"Tut, tut, now!" admonished Mrs. Moriarty, and then again, "Tut, tut!
Now Esther, dear," said she, after a pause, "you're getting to be a big
girl."

"I'm eight. I will become nine."

"Please God you will. But, anyway, you're big enough to know that your
father loves you as much as ever he did, but hasn't time to show it,
bein' in heavy trouble, God help him. You know about your auntie, her
that was to have the bringing up of you as your father often tells ye."

"She don't never comes," Esther complained. "I waits und I waits und my
auntie don't comes, und mine papa ain't lovin', und I needs I shall have
a baby out of that Central Park."

The heart loneliness of which Esther complained was real enough. The
material prosperity which had recently fallen upon her had deprived her
of all the old comfortable joys which had brightened less prosperous
days. Chief among these had been her father's light-hearted
companionship. Mrs. Moriarty, the brightest feature of the new
conditions, did her best to cheer and comfort the motherless child, but
she could not hope to take the place of Jacob Morowsky, who had changed
in so much more than name since he became John Nolan. Esther had
dutifully tried--and failed--to understand why she, who had for so long
been Esther Morowsky, was now Esther Nolan. And yet the explanation was
sufficiently ordinary, and was the cause of her improved surroundings
and the result of her father's preoccupation.

Jacob Morowsky had, upon his first coming to America, found employment
with old John Nolan, whose little shop of sacred statues, crucifixes,
and holy pictures was the survival of the Irish Catholic era in Henry
Street's history. There are not many traces of this era now remaining,
but John Nolan's little shop was one of them, and economy overcame
racial prejudice on the day he engaged Jacob Morowsky as his assistant.
Later he congratulated himself upon this apostasy, calling it
interchangeably "an act of charity, no more than that," or "the best bit
of b