The tea and the candy showed that her affections, working up to the father and drawn to the baby, were all right. The honey gave evidence that the fresh impulses of childhood had not been nipped and chilled. The hat and ribbons—best and most hopeful purchase of all—proved that the womanly vanity and love of prettiness still fluttered in her young soul. Nothing is so charming and so feminine in woman as the passion for dress. Laugh at it as we may, I think that men will agree that there is nothing so pathetic as a young woman out of whom all hope of fine appearance has been pressed. A gay ribbon is the sign in which woman conquers. I wager that Eve made a neat, many-colored thing of fig-leaves. But to return to Jane. I know that this desultory sketch should be closed with something unusual. Jane should die or get married. But she’s too young for either. And so her life is running on ever. She plods the streets as she used to do. She has quit selling the flaming scraps she used to sell, and now knits her young but resolute brow over crochet work, which she sells at marvelous prices. Her path is flecked with more sunshine than ever before, and at Sunday-school she is as smart a little woman as can be seen. If the shadow of a staggering figure, that falls so often across her course, could be lifted, she would have little else to grieve over. Not that she complains of this—not a bit of it. “Poor father is sick so much. How can he be expected to work?” And so she goes on, with her woman’s nature clinging to him closer than ever; even as the ivy clings to the old ruin. Hiding his shame from the world, wrapping him in the plenitude of her faith, and binding up his shattered resolves with her heart-strings. And as for Bob: I am strongly tempted to tell a lie, and say that he is either sober or dead. But he is neither. He is the same shiftless, irresponsible fellow that I have known for three years. His face is heavier, his eyes are smaller, his nose redder, his flesh more moist than ever. But in the depth of his debauch there seems to have been winged some idea of the excellence of Jane’s life, and the fineness of her martyrdom. He catches me anywhere he sees me, and, falling on my shirt-front, weeps copious tears of praise and pop-skull, while talking of her. He swears by her. By the way, I must do him justice. Yesterday he came to me very much affected. He was white-lipped, and trembling, and hungry. He had spent the night in the gutter, and the policeman who was scattering the disinfecting lime, either careless or wise beyond his kind, had powdered him all over. He seemed to be terribly in earnest. He raised his trembling hand to his hat and touched the place where the crape used to be, and swore that he intended to reform, for good and all. “S’elp me Jane!” he said.