--but some gang of skillful speculators, who knew
the precise moment to take advantage of the mechanism of the law and the
more uncertain mechanism of human nature so as to obtain for a small
amount what they could sell to others for much. The crisis in the
history of Clark's Field seemed approaching.

It was time. The fence of high white palings that Samuel had jealously
maintained about his old field had long since completely disappeared.
Latterly the neighbors crisscrossed the vacant portions of the Field
with short cuts and contractors either dumped refuse upon it or burrowed
into it for gravel. The sod had long since been stripped from every foot
of its surface. In a word, it was treated as no man's land, so low had
the Clark family sunk in the world. And it was covered with a cloud of
invisible disabilities, further than the original difficulty created by
Edward S. in not leaving an address behind him. There were liens against
it by the city for improvements in the way of gas and sewer and water
pipes, and for taxes, as well as first, second, and third mortgages of a
dubious character that John in extremity had been forced to put upon the
Field in order to "carry" his expectation. Under this burden of
invisible lien as well as outward degradation Clark's Field had
struggled until 1898, and the ultimate doom was not far off. John
thought so and struggled less to preserve his inheritance. What he owned
of the Field was a diminishing fraction, long since negligible, were it
not for the marvelous increase in all real-estate values, due to the
growth of population in these parts and the activity of the country. It
was rumored about the Square that Clark's Field would shortly be sold
for taxes, and a tax title, poor as that is, would probably be the best
title that could ever be got for the Field. Capitalists and their
lawyers were already figuring on that basis for the distribution of the
property....

But before we concern ourselves in the plot of these greedy exploiters,
it would be well to go back for a time to the dingy Church Street house
and the pale little Adelle, who was now in her twelfth year. Her
ancestors, certainly, had done little for her physical being. She was a
plain, small child, with not enough active blood in her apparently to
make a vivid life under any circumstances. She was meek and
self-effacing,--two excellent virtues for certain spheres, but not for a
poor child in America at the opening of t