lsive and pretty girl of
fifteen, whom he had missed for several days at the chapel services.
He had been in the room before. It was not one of the worst, for though
small and containing a cook-stove, a large bed, and a chest of drawers,
there was an attempt to make it tidy. In a dark closet opening out from
it was another large bed. As he knocked and opened the door, he saw that
Gretchen was not at home. Her father sat in a rocking-chair by an open
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