Black day followed black day, and grudged penny followed grudged penny, till at length there came a day when it seemed the blackness could become no blacker and when his remaining pennies were less than his fingers. On this day he sat long at his window, his wasted, despair-tightened face looking out upon the patched undergarments swinging from lines and upon the boxes and barrels and bottles and papers and rags that littered the deep bottom of the yard, grimly thinking over the prophecy of Kate Morgan. One of the two months she had given his honesty was gone. By the time the second had passed----? He shiveringly wondered. This day he ate no evening meal. For a week now one meal had been his daily ration, and that meal pitiably poor and pitiably small. He sat about his room till his nickel clock--which Kate Morgan had brought in one day and deposited upon the wash-stand with her undebatable air of finality--reported quarter past nine, when he rose and walked down into the street. It had been one of those warm days that sometimes come in mid-November--benign messages of remembrance, as it were, from departed summer--and now the people of the tenements filled the streets, for on the packed East Side the street, on warm days, is parlor to the parent and the lover, and nursery to the child. As David stepped forth he did not notice that he was watched by a pair of keen, boyish eyes from under the rim of a battered slouch hat, and had he noticed he would not have been aware that these same eyes had watched him before. It was a Wednesday evening and David, entangled among the people, like a vessel in a sargasso sea, pursued a slow course toward the Mission, never observing that a boy in a battered hat followed him a way then turned back. He took his place in the shadowed doorway and waited for Helen Chambers to appear. In a few minutes she came out, Dr. Franklin with her as usual. There was also a second man, gray-haired and slightly stooped, whom David recognised as an older brother of Mr. Chambers, and whom he remembered as a clear-visioned, gentle old philosopher greatly loved by his niece. As they passed, David leaned from the shadow to follow her with his eyes, and the light from the street lamp fell across his face. Dr. Franklin, chancing this instant to look in David's direction, excused himself to Helen and her uncle, who moved forward a few paces, and stepped to the doorway. David pressed frantically back into the shadow. "Good evening," said Dr. Franklin, holding out a firm, cordial hand, into which David laid his limp fingers. "I've seen you about several times since the evening you called. I've been looking for a chance to invite you to the Mission." David hardly heard him. He was thinking, wildly, "Suppose she should step to his side? Suppose he should draw me into the light?" It was a moment of blissful, agonising consternation.