ce with which, for some reason, she inspired him,
that he left with an easier mind.

It was not until the rector had arrived at the vestibule of the apartment
house next door that something--of the difficulty and delicacy of the
errand he had undertaken came home to him. Impulse had brought him thus
far, but now he stood staring helplessly at a row of bells, speaking
tubes, and cards. Which, for example, belonged to the lady whose soprano
voice pervaded the neighbourhood? He looked up and down the street, in
the vain hope of finding a messenger. The song continued: he had
promised to stop it. Hodder accused himself of cowardice.

To his horror, Hodder felt stealing over him, incredible though it seemed
after the depths through which he had passed, a faint sense of
fascination in the adventure. It was this that appalled him--this
tenacity of the flesh,--which no terrors seemed adequate to drive out.
The sensation, faint as it was, unmanned him. There were still many
unexplored corners in his soul.

He turned, once more contemplated the bells, and it was not until
then he noticed that the door was ajar. He pushed it open, climbed the
staircase, and stood in the doorway of what might be called a sitting
room, his eyes fixed on a swaying back before an upright piano against
the wall; his heart seemed to throb with the boisterous beat of the
music. The woman's hair, in two long and heavy plaits falling below her
waist, suddenly fascinated him. It was of the rarest of russet reds.
She came abruptly to the end of the song.

"I beg your pardon--" he began.

She swung about with a start, her music dropping to the floor, and stared
at him. Her tattered blue kimono fell away at her elbows, her full
throat was bare, and a slipper she had kicked off lay on the floor beside
her. He recoiled a little, breathing deeply. She stared at him.

"My God, how you scared me!" she exclaimed. Evidently a second glance
brought to her a realization of his clerical costume. "Say, how did you
get in here?"

"I beg your pardon," he said again, "but there is a very sick child in
the house next door and I came to ask you if you would mind not playing
any more to-night."

She did not reply at once, and her expression he found unsolvable. Much
of it might be traced to a life which had contracted the habit of taking
nothing on trust, a life which betrayed itself in unmistakable traces
about the eyes. And Hodder perceived that the face, if the sta