My protégée's destination turned out to be a long way off, quite in one of the suburbs of the city, where working people had their little homes--a region I was to become better acquainted with later. As we began to pass bakeries and cook-shops, the children began once more to clamor to their mother for something to eat, on which the poor thing tried to quiet them with promises of what they should have when they reached home. But I could perceive that her heart was low within her, and I stopped at a cook-shop and bought a liberal allowance of bread and jam and cookies, on which the young things fell to like famished wolves, while their mother overwhelmed me with blessings. We had not gone far, and were still in the centre of the city, when a handsome open carriage drove by us, and as it passed, there sat in it the young lady I had seen on the train, with a pleasant looking elderly man, whom I conjectured to be her father, and who appeared in a very good-humor with her or himself. As I was gazing at them, her eyes fell full into mine, and after a half-moment's mystification, she recognized me as I lifted my hat, and her face lit up with a pleasant smile of recognition. I found my feelings divided between pleasure at her sweet return of my bow and chagrin that she should find me in such a predicament; for I knew what a ridiculous figure I must cut with the dog between my feet and a frowsy child, thickly smeared with jam, in my arms. In fact, I could see that the girl was talking and laughing spiritedly with her father, evidently about us. I confess to a feeling of shame at the figure I must cut, and I wondered if she would not think I had lied to her in saying that I had never met them before. I did not know that the smile had been for Dix. When we reached, after a good hour's drive, the little street for which we were bound, I found my forecast fairly correct. The dingy little house, on which was the rusted number given Mrs. McNeil in her husband's letter, was shut up and bore no evidence of having been opened, except a small flower-pot with a sprig of green in it in a dusty, shutterless window. It was the sort of house that is a stove in summer and an ice-box in the winter. And there was a whole street of them. After we had knocked several times and I had tried to peep over the fence at the end of the street, the door of an adjoining tenement opened, and a slatternly, middle-aged woman peeped out. "Are you Mrs. McNeil?" she asked. "Yes."