By and by he got out, walked a little way southward in the hot, luminous shade of low-roofed tenement cottages that closed their window-shutters noiselessly, in sensitive-plant fashion, at his slow, meditative approach, and slightly and as noiselessly reopened them behind him, showing a pair of wary eyes within. Presently he recognized just ahead of him, standing out on the sidewalk, the little house that had been described to him by Mary. In a door-way that opened upon two low wooden sidewalk steps stood Mrs. Riley, clad in a crisp black and white calico, a heavy, fat babe poised easily in one arm. The Doctor turned directly toward the narrow alley, merely touching his hat to her as he pushed its small green door inward, and disappeared, while she lifted her chin at the silent liberty and dropped her eyelids. Dr. Sevier went down the cramped, ill-paved passage very slowly and softly. Regarding himself objectively, he would have said the deep shade of his thoughts was due partly, at least, to his fatigue. But that would hardly have accounted for a certain faint glow of indignation that came into them. In truth, he began distinctly to resent this state of affairs in the life of John and Mary Richling. An ill-defined anger beat about in his brain in search of some tangible shortcoming of theirs upon which to thrust the blame of their helplessness. "Criminal helplessness," he called it, mutteringly. He tried to define the idea--or the idea tried to define itself--that they had somehow been recreant to their social caste, by getting down into the condition and estate of what one may call the alien poor. Carondelet street had in some way specially vexed him to-day, and now here was this. It was bad enough, he thought, for men to slip into riches through dark back windows; but here was a brace of youngsters who had glided into poverty, and taken a place to which they had no right to stoop. Treachery,--that was the name for it. And now he must be expected,--the Doctor quite forgot that nobody had asked him to do it,--he must be expected to come fishing them out of their hole, like a rag-picker at a trash barrel.