And now a Children’s Aid Society was established there, teaching honest industry and proffering opportunity for decency to the thousands of boys and girls who had hitherto slept on cellar steps, or in barrels or in dens of vice and earned what little food they got by picking pockets, garroting drunkards, burglary, beggary, rag and bone hunting, peddling matches, apples, flowers, newspapers, or their own dirty bodies. Girls could now be something better than crossing-sweepers or twelve-year-old harlots and dance-hall lice. RoBards had often been called to the Five Points to meetings of this and other societies. There was horror enough there yet, but it was not unmitigated. There was a manhole open above the sewer and those who wanted to were aided to climb out into the air. He had often looked for Molly Lasher among the girls going out to decent tasks or returning from them. He had watched for her among the throngs still plying the most venerable of trades. But her pretty, vicious smile was no longer to be seen. Perhaps she had been murdered, or sent to a prison; perhaps she had gone round the Horn to California, perhaps she had gone West overland. She might be running a saloon somewhere west, or conducting a salon as the pretentious wife of a bonanza king. Another Lasher girl had grown up to replace her in the hut, and perhaps later to trace her footsteps on the streets of New York. RoBards had seen her now and then as he drove past to the station. Usually she leaned across the gate and dreamed wide-eyed of something that made her wistful. Either she was paler than the other Lasher young, or washed oftener, for there was a cleanliness about her skin and in the clothes she was pushing through. Thinking of her now, he was surprised to find that he remembered a gradual change in her as she lolled across the gate. She had grown higher, the arms that fell listlessly had lengthened and rounded; and so had her once hollow chest, and her eyes and her mouth. The last time he saw her her hair was combed. There might have been a ribbon around it somewhere. He had an idea that her name was Aletta. Her mother had mentioned some such name to him once when she had checked him to whine: “No word of my boy Jud yet. After all these years wouldn’t he ’a’ wrote me a line, wouldn’t he ’a’ got home somehow in all these years, don’t you think—if he was still alive?” He did not like to consider old Mrs. Lasher and he rose to continue his search for his own son, also lost in a sea of mystery, gone a-whaling after some strange love. RoBards avoided the Tarn of Mystery, so gayly named and so justified in the event. But he saw no sign of Junior elsewhere, so he drew near the loathsome spot, circling about it and coming closer reluctantly. The old rail fence was almost rotted away, but he did not need to climb across it, for there was a path that led to an opening where two of the upper rails had been laid on the ground.