"Let me hear, Father Honore, so soon as you learn anything definite; I'll keep you posted so far as I hear." "I will. Good night, Mr. Van Ostend." * * * * * On reaching the iron gates to the courtyard, the priest stepped aside to give unimpeded passage to a carriage just leaving the house. As it passed him, the electric light flashed athwart the bowed glass front, already dripping with sleet, and behind it he caught a glimpse of a girl's delicate face that rose from out the folds of a chinchilla wrap, like a flower from its sheath. She was chatting gaily with her maid. II The night was wild. New York can show such in late November. A gale from the northeast was driving before it a heavy sleet that froze as it fell, coating the overhead wires and glazing the asphalt and sidewalks. It lacked an hour of midnight. From Fleischmann's bakery, the goal of each man among the shivering hundreds lined up on Tenth Street, the light streamed out upon a remnant of Life's jetsam--that which is submerged, which never comes to the surface unless drawn there by some searching and rescuing hand; that which the home-sheltered never see by daylight, never know, save from hearsay. In the neighboring rectory of Grace Church one dim light was burning in an upper room. The marble church itself looked a part of the winter scene; its walls and pinnacles, already encrusted with ice crystals, glittered fantastically in the rays of the arc-light; beneath them, the dark, shuffling, huddling line of humanity moved uneasily in the discomfort of the keen wind. At twelve o 'clock, each unknown, unidentified human unit in that line, as he reaches the window, puts forth his hand for the loaf, and thrusting it beneath his coat, if he be so fortunate as to have one, or under his arm, vanishes.... Whither? As well ask: Whence came he?