too to scare and disgust them. Yet she knew herself more
right than they all the time.

When she sat at the head of the dinner-table an hour or two later, soft
silken drapery having taken the place of the soft woollen, and her usual
calm good temper on the surface instead of pallor and tears, her secret
mood was very much the same. Mr. Neckart sat apart from her: he spoke
little, and that only to the captain, who was eager about the political
question of the day. Judge Rhodes, dropping his voice, poured into her
ear eulogiums on Van Ness.

"Did you see him smiling down on that brute? Now, how did he know but he
had given him the hydrophobia?"

"I appreciated the self-control," smiling. "So did Bruno. It drove him
mad."

"Self-control? I tell you, it's super-human! I've thought sometimes it
was a divine power sustaining him. Why, I saw that man at his mother's
deathbed. She lay in his arms, and he sang to her--hymns, you know--sang
to her in a clear, unbroken voice until her spirit had passed out of
hearing. I couldn't have done it, even for a stranger."

"I am sure you could not," said Miss Swendon.

"He sinks self out of sight wholly, you see. Now, he had a dog once--a
hound like yours--brought him up. It was touching to see them
together--the devotion of the poor brute. Well, he sold him, and gave
the hundred dollars to his State Home for Children. He could not afford
such a luxury as the dog's love, he said, while these poor wretches
needed so much."

"But my dog," said Miss Swendon quite distinctly, "is more to me than
all the wretches in Pennsylvania."

There was an awkward silence.

Mr. Van Ness turned his handsome face on her with a benign nod: "How
natural and beautiful that is! Her dog and her babe and her lover are
more to a woman than all the outside world. So they ought to be! Love is
like air: when it is confined it only fills a given space, but give it
escape and it spreads over all God's creation. The day is not far
distant when young, fair women will freely give themselves to the work
of raising the dangerous classes."

"Well, I don't know about that," said Rhodes. "I'm growing hopeless.
What with ignorance and whiskey and conceit, the dangerous classes even
here are too heavily handicapped to make any running. They will need two
or three lives after this, it seems to me, to bring them up to a fair
starting-point."

"That's a fact!" cried the captain. "Now, there are beggars. My plan is
to