“I am quite warm. I will only detain you for a few moments. I want you to help me.” “Indeed, I will; has anything gone wrong?” “Yes,” he said, with a hard look. “One of your poor people?” she asked. She sat down by the fire, one silken foot on the fender; her cloak had slipped down behind her, and she was pulling out her gloves, and smoothing them on her knee. She looked up at him with a charming smile. “Yes,” he said, “one of my poor people--and yours. Miss Wharton, can you tell me anything about Nellie Sherman?” “Nellie?” Sara Wharton’s face began to change. “Oh, Dr. Morse, I wish I could tell you anything encouraging about her. She quarreled with her aunt, and went to work at a factory in North Mercer. She hardly ever comes home, I’m sorry to say; she is boarding with a respectable family, I believe, and I think she does not depend on Mrs. Sherman for any money. But I’ve lost my hold on her--if I ever had any! She has only been to see me once since she came home in September. You know I sent her away in the summer? And she got well, Dr. Morse!” she ended triumphantly. “Yes; she did,” he said with stern significance. “What is the matter? Is she sick again? is she--_dead_?” “Dead? I wish she were.” “Dr. Morse!” “Miss Wharton, that miserable creature has lived long enough to corrupt and seduce an innocent boy. Young Jack Hayes has--I beg your pardon, this is plain talk--but I am a physician and you are--a philanthropist, so we need not mince words,--Jack has gone off with her. I have come to-night from his mother’s bedside. Mrs. Hayes has just heard what he has done--her innocent boy.” Sara rose, shrinking and wincing as though he had struck her. “I thought it possible,” he went on, “that you might know where she was living, and perhaps I could get on her track. She met Jack up in the country; he was there with a tutor; of course, she had no difficulty in finding him when he came back to town. He went off with her on Sunday, we think--at least, one of the Clay boys saw him with her Sunday night, and he hasn’t been at home since.” “I don’t know where she is,” Sara said brokenly. “I went to see Mrs. Sherman before I came here, and do you know what she said to me? She sat, poor woman, with the tears streaming down her cheeks: ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘if I could only know she was dead! If she was just safe in her grave!’” Sara shivered. “I thought to myself, ‘She would be, you poor soul, if some of us wise people had not interfered.’ I reproach myself,” he went on savagely, “that I did not try to dissuade you when you told me you meant to keep the girl alive. We ought to stamp such vermin out--or let it die out, at least. Instead, you philanthropists and we doctors do all we can to keep them alive,--that they may propagate their kind! Fortunately, nature generally prevents that,--but Nellie’s mother was a fallen woman, you may remember? Poor Jack--poor Mrs. Hayes! Miss Wharton, our hands are not innocent of that boy’s blood.”