She looked into the prematurely wrinkled face, into the half-dim eyes, she held the hand fast with a pressure not of force but of entreaty. Then they passed on, the by-standers shouting out the derisive chorus of “Come to Jesus!” with which London roughs delight in mocking any passenger whom they suspect of religious tendencies. In all her sadness, Erica could not help smiling to herself. That she, an atheist, Luke Raeburn's daughter, should be hooted at as a follower of Jesus! In the meantime the woman she had spoken to stood still staring after her. If an angel had suddenly appeared to her, she could not have been more startled. A human hand had given her coarse, guilty, trembling hand such a living pressure as it had never before received; a pure, loving face had looked at her; a voice, which was trembling with earnestness and full of the pathos of restrained tears, had pleaded with her for her own child. The woman's dormant motherhood sprung into life. Yes, he was her own child after all. She did not really want to hurt him, but a sort of demon was inside her, the demon of drink and sometimes it made her almost mad. She looked down now with love-cleared eyes at the little crying child who still clung to her ragged skirt. She stooped and picked him up, and wrapped a bit of her shawl round him. Presently after a fearful struggle, she turned away from the public-house and carried the child home to bed. The jeering chorus was soon checked, for the shutters were taken down, and the doors thrown wide, and light, and cheerfulness, and shelter, and the drink they were all craving for, were temptingly displayed to draw in the waiting idlers. But the woman had gone home, and one rather surly looking man still leaned against the wall looking up the street where Tom and Erica had disappeared. “Blowed if that ain't a bit of pluck!” he said to himself, and therewith fell into a reverie. Tom talked of temperance work, about which he was very eager, all the way to Guilford Terrace. Erica, on reaching home, went at once to her father's room. She found him propped up with pillows in his arm chair; he was still only well enough to attempt the lightest of light literature, and was looking at some old volumes of “Punch” which the Osmonds had sent across. “You look tired, Eric!” he exclaimed. “Was there a good attendance?” “Very,” she replied, but so much less brightly than usual that Raeburn at once divined that something had annoyed her. “Was Mr. Masterman dull?” “Not dull,” she replied, hesitatingly. Then, with more than her usual vehemence, “Father, I can't endure him! I wish we didn't have such men on our side! He is so flippant, so vulgar!” “Of course he never was a model of refinement,” said Raeburn, “but he is effective very effective. It is impossible that you should like his style; he is, compared with you, what a theatrical poster is to a delicate tete-de-greuze. How did he specially offend you tonight?”