John Marvel had a nose like a pointer for all who were desolate and oppressed. How he discovered them, except, as Eleanor Leigh said, by some sort of a sixth sense like that of the homing pigeon, surpasses my comprehension. It is enough that he found and furrowed them out. Thus, he had learned that a little girl, a child of a noted criminal, had been ill-treated by the children at a public school and that her mother and herself were almost starving, and had hastened at once to find her. Like a hunted animal she had gone and hidden herself in what was scarcely better than a den. Here John Marvel found her, in a wretched cellar, the mother ill on a pallet of straw, and both starving, without food or fire. The door was barred, as was her heart, and it was long before any answer came to the oft-repeated knock. But at last his patience was rewarded. The door opened a bare inch, and a fierce black eye in a haggard white face peered at him through the chink. "What do you want?" "To help you." The door opened slowly and John Marvel entered an abode which he said to me afterward he was glad for the first time in his life to be so near-sighted as not to be able to see. A pallet of rags lay in a corner, and on a box crouched, rather than sat, a little girl with a broken crutch by her side, her eyes fastened on the newcomer with a gaze of half bewilderment. It was some time before John Marvel could get anything out of the woman, but he held a key which at last unlocks every heart,--a divine and penetrating sympathy. And presently the woman told him her story. Her husband was a fugitive from justice. She did not say so, but only that he had had to leave the city because the police were after him. His friends had turned against him and against her. She did not know where her husband was, but believed he had left the country, unless, indeed, he were dead. She was waiting to hear from him, and meantime everything which she had had gone, and now, though she did not say so, they were starving. To relieve them was as instinctive with John Marvel as to breathe. The next step was to help them permanently. It was hard to do, because the woman was at bay and was as suspicious as a she-wolf, and the child was as secretive as a young cub. John turned to one, however, who he believed, and with good reason, knew how to do things which were lost to his dull comprehension.