“You don’t need a sack. You’ll come in my carriage, and I’ll wrap a rug around you.” “My!” said Nellie, “is your carriage here? One of the club girls told me it had satin cushions. Is that so, Miss Wharton?” Sara bit her lip. “Never mind about the cushions. Oh, Nellie, dear, don’t think of things like that! Only just try with all your might to be good. Will you, Nellie?” “Why, certainly,” said Nellie. * * * * * Sara Wharton drove home with a very serious look on her face. She had induced Nellie to leave that dreadful house; indeed, the girl had yielded with that fatally facile willingness to do what she was told which should have forbade any of the joy that may be felt over the one sinner that repenteth. But in the glow of “saving” the poor child, it was not easy for Sara Wharton to realize that Nellie’s first experience of sin had only reached the stage of the young smoker’s disgust with his first cigar. The young lady, with her carriage and her satin cushions, had come at the right moment--the moment when the expediency of morality had forced itself upon the girl’s little, flimsy common-sense, and she was willing to go shuddering back to comfortable decency; but as for any spiritual perception of sin, and righteousness, and judgment, it did not exist. Nellie had received her aunt’s forgiveness as though she were conferring a favor. Indeed, she sighed with some impatience when Mrs. Sherman wept over her; and she said again, fretfully, in response to Miss Wharton’s assertions that _now_ Nellie was going to be good,--“Why certainly, yes;” and looked about wearily, as if she wished the scene might come to an end. “Nobody shan’t never know, my darling,” Mrs. Sherman told her, her voice breaking with tenderness; “I’ll say you’ve been away, visiting friends.” “A’ right,” said Nellie. And neither the aunt nor the niece understood Miss Wharton’s quick protest against trying to hide one sin by another. Sara, driving home, tired and saddened by the emotions of the afternoon, acknowledged to herself that the easy repentance was made of still less value by the easy forgiveness. “But some day she will repent, really and truly,” she told herself; but she sighed, and dropped the window of the brougham, leaning forward to get the dash of wet, cold wind in her face. It seemed to her as though she still felt the lifeless air of those horrible halls and stairways, and the scent of musk, and tobacco smoke, and stale liquor. “The only thing to do, the only way to save her is to love her,” Sara Wharton said to herself, “and I’m going to love her!” When she reached home, and came in out of the cold dusk into the firelit hall, this divine intention of loving shone on her face with a beautiful solemnity. Her seriousness was so marked that her mother, who was just saying good evening to a departing caller, noticed it and said, with some anxiety:-- “My dear, there is nothing the matter, I hope?”