window, on the sill of which stood a pot of carnations, the Easter gift
of St. George's, a wax-faced, hollow-eyed man of gentle manners, who
looked round wearily at the priest. The mother was washing clothes in a
tub in one corner; in another corner was a half-finished garment from a
slop-shop. The woman alternated the needle at night and the tub in the
daytime. Seated on the bed, with a thin, sick child in her arms, was
Dr. Leigh. As she looked up a perfectly radiant smile illuminated her
usually plain face, an unworldly expression of such purity and
happiness that she seemed actually beautiful to the priest, who stopped,
hesitating, upon the threshold.

"Oh, you needn't be afraid to come in, Father Damon," she cried out; "it
isn't contagious--only rash."

Father Damon, who would as readily have walked through a pestilence
as in a flower-garden, only smiled at this banter, and replied, after
speaking to the sick man, and returning in German the greeting of the
woman, who had turned from the tub, "I've no doubt you are disappointed
that it isn't contagious!" And then, to the mother: "Where is Gretchen?
She doesn't come to the chapel."

"Nein," replied the woman, in a mixture of German and English, "it don't
come any more in dot place; it be in a shtore now; it be good girl."

"What, all day?"

"Yaas, by six o'clock, and abends so spate. Not much it get, but my man
can't earn nothing any more." And the woman, as she looked at him, wiped
her eyes with the corner of her apron.

"But, on Sunday?" Father Damon asked, still further.

"Vell, it be so tired, and goed up by de Park with Dick Loosing and dem
oder girls."

"Don't you think it better, Father Damon," Dr. Leigh interposed, "that
Gretchen should have fresh air and some recreation on Sunday?"

"Und such bootiful tings by de Museum," added the mother.

"Perhaps," said he, with something like a frown on his face, and then
changed the subject to the sick child. He did not care to argue the
matter when Dr. Leigh was present, but he resolved to come again and
explain to the mother that her daughter needed some restraining power
other than her own impulse, and that without religious guidance she was
pretty certain to drift into frivolous and vulgar if not positively bad
ways. The father was a free-thinker; but Father Damon thought he had
some hold on the mother, who was of the Lutheran communion, but had
followed her husband so far as to become indifferent to an