"—In case you ever become curious to see little Stephanie Quest, whom you have aided so generously——" she explained. Cleland, recollecting with increasing annoyance that he had three hundred dollars less to waste on Christensen than he had that morning, muttered the polite formality of leave-taking required of him, and bowed himself out, carrying the slip of paper in his gloved fingers, extended as though he were looking for a place to drop it. Down in the street, where his car stood, the sidewalks were slowly whitening under leisurely falling snowflakes. The asphalt already was a slippery mess. "Where’s _that_!" he demanded peevishly, shoving the slip of paper at his chauffeur. "Do you know?" "I can find it, sir." "All right," snapped John Cleland. He stepped into the little limousine and settled back with a grunt. Then he hunched himself up in the corner and perked the fur robe over his knees, muttering. Thoughts of his wife, of his son, had been heavily persistent that morning. Never before had he felt actually old—he was only fifty-odd. Never before had he felt himself so alone, so utterly solitary. Never had he so needed the comradeship of his only son. He had relapsed into a sort of grim, unhappy lethargy, haunted by memories of his son’s baby days, when the car stopped in the tenement-lined street, swarming with push-carts and children. The damp, rank stench of the unwashed smote him as he stepped out and entered the dirty hallway, set with bells and letter boxes and littered with débris and filthy melting snow. The place was certainly vile enough. A deformed woman with sore eyes directed him to the floor where the Schmidt family lived. On the landing he stumbled over several infants who were playing affectionately with a dead cat—probably the first substitute for a doll they had ever possessed. A fight in some room on the second floor arrested his attention, and he halted, alert and undecided, when the dim hallway resounded with screams of murder. But a slatternly young woman who was passing explained very coolly that it was only "thim Cassidys mixing it"; and she went her way down stairs with her cracked pitcher, and he continued upward. "Schmidt? In there," replied a small boy to his inquiry; and resumed his game of ball against the cracked plaster wall of the passage. Answering his knock, a shapeless woman opened the door. "Mrs. Schmidt?" "Yes, sir,"—retying the string which alone kept up her skirt. He explained briefly who he was, where he had been, what he had done through the United Charities for the child, Stephanie. "I’d like to take a look at her," he added, "if it’s perfectly convenient." Mrs. Schmidt began to cry: "_Ex_-cuse me, sir; I’m so glad we can keep her. Albert has all he can do for our own kids—but the poor little thing!—it seemed hard to send her away to a Home——" She gouged out the tears abruptly with the back of a red, water-soaked hand.