s eyes, she added
involuntarily: "I have been unhappy--in great trouble."

"YOU in trouble? I've always thought of you as being so high up, where
everything was just grand. Sometimes, when I felt real mean, and got to
wondering why things were so queerly fixed in the world, I used to
remember that you were having a lovely time, anyhow, and that seemed to
show there was a kind of justice somewhere. But you mustn't sit here too
long--it's fearfully damp. Don't you feel strong enough to walk on a
little ways now?" she broke off.

"Yes--yes; I must go home," Lily murmured, rising.

Her eyes rested wonderingly on the thin shabby figure at her side. She
had known Nettie Crane as one of the discouraged victims of over-work and
anaemic parentage: one of the superfluous fragments of life destined to
be swept prematurely into that social refuse-heap of which Lily had so
lately expressed her dread. But Nettie Struther's frail envelope was now
alive with hope and energy: whatever fate the future reserved for her,
she would not be cast into the refuse-heap without a struggle.

"I am very glad to have seen you," Lily continued, summoning a smile to
her unsteady lips. "It'll be my turn to think of you as happy--and the
world will seem a less unjust place to me too."

"Oh, but I can't leave you like this--you're not fit to go home alone.
And I can't go with you either!" Nettie Struther wailed with a start of
recollection. "You see, it's my husband's night-shift--he's a
motor-man--and the friend I leave the baby with has to step upstairs to
get HER husband's supper at seven. I didn't tell you I had a baby, did I?
She'll be four months old day after tomorrow, and to look at her you
wouldn't think I'd ever had a sick day. I'd give anything to show you the
baby, Miss Bart, and we live right down the street here--it's only three
blocks off." She lifted her eyes tentatively to Lily's face, and then
added with a burst of courage: "Why won't you get right into the cars and
come home with me while I get baby's supper? It's real warm in our
kitchen, and you can rest there, and I'll take YOU home as soon as ever
she drops off to sleep."

It WAS warm in the kitchen, which, when Nettie Struther's match had made
a flame leap from the gas-jet above the table, revealed itself to Lily as
extraordinarily small and almost miraculously clean. A fire shone through
the polished flanks of the iron stove, and near it stood a crib in which
a baby was si