On a summer morning, by merely craning her neck, she could peer down through an open window and learn who were present of her special following. If she spied the old charwoman, whose honesty was not above suspicion, or Dan, who stole grain on the wharves, she nodded her head with satisfaction. It was more than possible, she considered, even if the priest's exhortations were lost on their befuddled minds, that the pure strong notes of the organ might reach their consciences, the beautiful colours of the windows cause some expansion of their dwarfed souls. So she completed her survey like an inquiring angel, then settled to her work of the day. Emily trimmed hats, furnishing them for a Division Street milliner, and earned a very comfortable livelihood; for she trimmed with an abandon, a daring, a freedom that no other trimmer could equal. That she might have full scope for the expression of her individuality, she was granted the privilege of working at home instead of under the eye of her employer. She was regarded as an artist, and more than once her creations had changed the prevailing styles in that section. If Emily, canny soul, had her own ideas about the beauty of her hats, she kept them to herself and it is not for me to reveal them. It was sufficient that the hats suited the heads they were intended to adorn. Humming under her breath, she curled and looped and tied and twisted with such swiftness that the room was filled with the shimmer of satin, the flutter of laces, the darting of wings, the bursting of flowers; and so unremitting was her industry that by night the wire frames, delivered to her in the morning, had been converted into veritable traps for the captivation of men's hearts. Working away through the long hours, all the vanity that had never found expression in her own life, flew into her needle; she placed feathers at an irresistible angle, sewed buckles and bows in telling positions. When she fared along the streets, quiet and demure, carrying her great pile of boxes, who would have guessed that she was a great matchmaker? Yet such was the case. And when she met one of her creations, brave and flaunting as youth itself, accompanied by a male hat, she knew that her work was succeeding. When the hats proclaimed a maid and a lad, her spirits rose; but when they proclaimed an errant wife and her admirer, her spirits clouded. For once they had left her hands with all their potency for good or evil, Emily had no more control over her hats than a parent over the children that have quitted the hearth. Sometimes her pangs were so sharp at what she witnessed that for days she trimmed with a sobriety, a propriety that was the despair of her employers. Indeed, she fairly sewed a sermon into the hats until a protest of loud-voiced dismay stayed her hand. Thereupon the full tide of her remorse was diverted into another channel.