his
hands."

Applebaum had risen from his place while they were talking and had taken
away the boy's plate. The exit of his unsightly, bad mannered guest was
a great relief, and he now sat down and attacked his food with interest.
"We have fed the hungry," he said solemnly from the depths of his plate.

Kathleen flew at him. "And so that's why you done it! I was wondering
you were so thick with the kids all of a sudden. You wanted to ease your
conscience on Christmas day! Well, you're in it now with the Bowery
Mission and the Salvation Army and Tim Sullivan and you can enjoy
yourself. Charity to-day is on the job."

"Why not say the Christmas spirit?" he made answer. "I meant it kindly."

A lovely look came over the Irish woman's face. All her irritability
vanished, and, smiling at them like some strong saint, she lifted her
coffee cup. "To the Christmas spirit, then, and may it stay with us all
the year round."

"Hertha, here, is the Christian," she said later, when they were all
comfortably seated in the front room, "she goes to church more times
than I can count."

"It's a good habit for a woman," Billy retorted. "What did they preach
about this morning?"

"I hardly know," Hertha answered. "The sermon was very short, but the
service and the singing by the choir boys was most beautiful."

"And the priests in their robes and the altar with its candles and the
incense," Kathleen added.

"Oh, we are not High Church like that."

"Why not do the whole thing if you're about it? I wouldn't stop at one
gown, I'd have two, a dozen for the great events, and as many candles as
the rich could pay for. But what is there in it all for a hungry heart?

"I remember once," Kathleen continued, a look of sorrow coming into her
gray eyes, "going to church of a Palm Sunday. I had broken from the
faith since the priest went against me and the girls in my big strike,
but I thought of how my father and mother, if they'd been living, would
have asked me to go, and I went to please them. I'd hardly entered the
door, though, when the smell of the incense and the sight of the
priests' rich robes sickened me. I thought of the lowly Nazarene who had
not where to lay His head, and it seemed to me that I must scream; so I
left and walked down the street, and across the way I saw another
building, with a plain entrance, and over the doorway the words
'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.' 'I don't know what it may mean,' I
thought to myself,