It was, in short, wholly inexplicable that this little woman should simply go about doing good, without any ulterior purpose whatever, not even notoriety. Did she love these people? She did not ever say anything about that. In the Knights of Labor circle, and in the little clubs for the study of social questions, which she could only get leisure to attend infrequently, she was not at all demonstrative about any religion of humanity. Perhaps she simply felt that she was a part of these people, and that whether they rejected her or received her, there was nothing for her to do but to give herself to them. She would probably have been surprised if Father Damon had told her that she was in this following a great example, and there might have been a tang of agnostic bitterness in her reply. When she thought of it the condition seemed to her hopeless, and the attitude of what was called civilization towards it so remorseless and indifferent, and that of Christianity so pharisaical. If she ever lost her temper, it was when she let her mind run in this nihilistic channel, in bitterness against the whole social organization, and the total outcome of civilization so far as the mass of humanity is concerned. One day Father Damon climbed up to the top of a wretched tenement in Baxter Street in search of a German girl, an impulsive and pretty girl of fifteen, whom he had missed for several days at the chapel services. He had been in the room before. It was not one of the worst, for though small and containing a cook-stove, a large bed, and a chest of drawers, there was an attempt to make it tidy. In a dark closet opening out from it was another large bed. As he knocked and opened the door, he saw that Gretchen was not at home. Her father sat in a rocking-chair by an open window, on the sill of which stood a pot of carnations, the Easter gift of St. George's, a wax-faced, hollow-eyed man of gentle manners, who looked round wearily at the priest. The mother was washing clothes in a tub in one corner; in another corner was a half-finished garment from a slop-shop. The woman alternated the needle at night and the tub in the daytime. Seated on the bed, with a thin, sick child in her arms, was Dr. Leigh. As she looked up a perfectly radiant smile illuminated her usually plain face, an unworldly expression of such purity and happiness that she seemed actually beautiful to the priest, who stopped, hesitating, upon the threshold. “Oh, you needn't be afraid to come in, Father Damon,” she cried out; “it isn't contagious--only rash.” Father Damon, who would as readily have walked through a pestilence as in a flower-garden, only smiled at this banter, and replied, after speaking to the sick man, and returning in German the greeting of the woman, who had turned from the tub, “I've no doubt you are disappointed that it isn't contagious!” And then, to the mother: “Where is Gretchen? She doesn't come to the chapel.”