But if the faintest spark of jealousy glowed in Mary's heart, it was extinguished at once and forever by another recollection--a remark of Phil's as they once waited on the side-track together, going up to Bauer after the San Jacinto festival. It was just after she had confessed to the unconscious eavesdropping that made her a hearer of that song. "Yes," he said, "that time will always be one of the sweetest and most sacred of my memories. One's earliest love always is, they say, like the first white violet in the spring. But--_there is always a summer after every spring, you know._" Who cares for one little violet of a bygone spring when the prodigal wealth of a whole wonderful summertime is being poured out for one? So when Phil said again musingly, "It does seem strange, how we've always belonged to each other, doesn't it?" Mary looked up with a twinkling smile to say: "How could it be otherwise with _Philip and Mary on a shilling_?" And then she showed him the old English shilling which she wore on her watch-fob, the charm which she had drawn from Eugenia's wedding cake. To Phil's unbounded amusement she told the story of dropping it into the contribution plate that Christmas service, and getting lost in the streets of New York in trying to rescue it from the bank where it had been taken for deposit. CHAPTER VII HER GREAT RENUNCIATION Mary went back to her work next day, but not to the same old treadmill. It could never be that again. The thought that Phil was waiting for her, working to provide a home for her, glorified the most commonplace day, and came between her and her most disagreeable tasks. It was uppermost in her mind when she made her visits to the tenements, and often caused her to pause and ask herself why the gods had picked her out to make her the most blessed among mortals. What had _she_ done that life should bestow so much more on her than it had on poor Dena and Elsie Whayne? Somehow the sharp contrast between her lot and theirs hurt her more each time that it was forced upon her notice. It began to make her feel personally responsible, if not for the difference between them, at least for making that difference less. Why she owed it to them to do anything to make their lives more livable, she could not tell, but the obligation to do so weighed upon her more heavily every day. Maybe if her endeavors had not been so effectual she might not have felt the obligation so keenly, but she could not fail to see the difference that her visits made to the families in the Row. Sometimes she counted over the things she accomplished, as one might count the beads of a rosary, not from any sense of pride in what she had done, but as a sort of self-justification; asking herself, since she had done that much, could more be reasonably expected.