The hall was very cold, and they were chilled with the wind of a bleak November day. Catharine shivered beneath her thin shawl, and Mary Margaret insisted on folding a portion of her own gray cloak around her, using this as an excuse for a hearty embrace or two, which left the poor girl a little less nervous and disconsolate than she would have been. Once or twice a side-door opened, and some poor, want-stricken woman came out, and moved slowly toward the front door. Catharine observed that there was a look of angry defiance on one face, and that another was bathed in tears. She wondered strangely at this. Why should the poor women go away from a place like that, angry or weeping? These thoughts made her shrink closer to Mary Margaret, and she longed to ask that kind creature to leave the place and take her home again. Three persons had come out from the side-door, and gone forth to the street with sullen, discontented faces, when our two friends were summoned from the hall. CHAPTER XXVI. THE PROFESSED PHILANTHROPIST. The two friends entered a parlor elaborately furnished, and warmed to a degree that made Catharine faint, coming in as she did from the cold air of the hall. A table, with a small desk upon it, stood before the fire, and between that and the cheerful blaze sat a tall and exceedingly sanctimonious person, clothed in a blue merino dress, gathered in folds around the waist and fitting tightly at the throat. Catharine’s heart sunk as she met this woman’s eyes, the expression was so schooled—the sleek, hypocritical air was so transparent. She had evidently assumed the saint, till she absolutely believed in her own infallibility. Hollow and selfish to the core, she had no idea that it was not a praiseworthy and most holy action to sit in pampered ease from morning to night, and use the money provided by the truly benevolent as a means patronizing and wounding those who were compelled to submit to her unwomanly curiosity and sly dictation. This woman had subdued her thin, tallowy features into sanctimonious meekness so long, and had bedewed them so often with tears which came obedient to her wish, that she had obtained the look of one ready to burst into a holy fit of weeping, because all the world was not formed upon the model of her own immaculate self. Whenever an applicant appeared before her, a watery compassion for the wickedness, for which she always gave credit in advance, suffused her cold eyes. Even her hair partook of the general character, and was smoothed back from that narrow forehead with a precision that nothing less than a tornado could have ruffled.