Hurrying along a narrow street lined with cheap saloons McGregor went in at the door of the settlement house and sat in a chair at a desk facing Margaret Ormsby. He knew something of her work in the First Ward and that she was beautiful and self-possessed. He was determined that she should help him. Sitting in the chair and looking at her across the flat-top desk he choked back into her throat the terse sentences with which she was wont to greet visitors. “It is all very well for you to sit there dressed up and telling me what women in your position can do and can't do,” he said, “but I've come here to tell you what you will do if you are of the kind that want to be useful.” The speech of McGregor was a challenge which Margaret, the modern daughter of one of our modern great men, could not well let pass. Had she not brazened out her timidity to go calmly among prostitutes and sordid muttering drunkards, serene in her consciousness of business-like purpose? “What is it you want?” she asked sharply. “You have just two things that will help me,” said McGregor; “your beauty and your virginity. These things are a kind of magnet, drawing the women of the street to you. I know. I've heard them talk. “There are women who come in here who know who it was killed that boy in the passageway and why it was done,” McGregor went on. “You're a fetish with these women. They are children and they come in here to look at you as children peep around curtains at guests sitting in the parlour of their houses. “Well I want you to call these children into the room and let them tell you family secrets. The whole ward here knows the story of that killing. The air is filled with it. The men and women keep trying to tell me, but they're afraid. The police have them scared and they half-tell me and then run away like frightened animals. “I want them to tell you. You don't count with the police down here. They think you're too beautiful and too good to touch the real life of these people. None of them--the bosses or the police--are watching you. I'll keep kicking up dust and you get the information I want. You can do the job if you're any good.” After McGregor's speech the woman sat in silence and looked at him. For the first time she had met a man who overwhelmed her and was in no way diverted by her beauty nor her self-possession. A hot wave, half anger, half admiration, swept over her. McGregor stared at the woman and waited. “I've got to have facts,” he said. “Give me the story and the names of those who know the story and I'll make them tell. I have some facts now--got them by bullying a girl and by choking a bartender in an alley. Now I want you in your way to put me in the way of getting more facts. You make the women talk and tell you and then you tell me.”