It turned out as she hoped. One night she was at the Palace in St. Petersburg. After dinner the Czar came and seated himself beside her. Soon they were deep in intimate conversation. She began telling him what her new-found friend in Paris had done for her. She talked wisely as he listened attentively. At length he said— "But, Nancy, _you_ have always been good, always right." "No," she answered; "till now I have never known the Christ. She has made Him real to me, brought Him near to me, and He has become what He never was before—my personal Friend." *CHAPTER X* *THE BURNING QUESTION* It was the often expressed wish of Mrs. Josephine Butler that the Maréchale might be able to join her crusade against the infamous White Slave Traffic. In one of her earliest letters to her friend she said: "Dearest Catherine, the wicked party, as you know, have triumphed in the elections in Switzerland, and the Geneva government has passed that evil Law which our friends were trying to stop.... How nice it would be if you and I could _stand up together_ in Geneva, and denounce their wickedness and proclaim the Saviour. I should love to do so." At a later time she wrote of her young friend, "Oh, I sometimes think if she were in the work of our Federation, what a harvest she might bring us in, or rather bring in for God!" The Maréchale regarded the wish of that saintly and chivalrous woman as involving a kind of sacred trust. Her own heart was early and deeply troubled by the darker aspects of our modern civilisation. When she and her two brave comrades, Florence Soper and Adelaide Cox, took their first flat in Paris, they were shocked to learn that they had as their nearest neighbours—above and beneath, to the right and to the left—families unconsecrated by any marriage tie; and in the course of their ordinary work they found themselves hourly confronted by all the devils of vice. The lurid facts, of which most Christians, happily for their own peace of mind, know little or nothing, were burned into the souls of these noble women, each of whom dedicated herself to a battle _à outrance_ against this most appalling form of evil. And have they not faithfully kept their vow? Are there any living Englishwomen who have done so much to protect our innocent children and raise our fallen sisters as these three, who first toiled and suffered and prayed together thirty years ago in the Villette of Paris? In redeeming her pledge, the Maréchale not only gave midnight suppers to the _filles déchues_ of the great cities in which she conducted her campaigns, not only founded Rescue Homes in Paris, Nîmes, Lyons and Brussels, but endeavoured to make the problem of purity a national question, to be dealt with in a statesmanlike manner by every patriotic citizen.