Mildred went home with the feeling that the leaden monotony of her life was broken. The hand of genuine Christian sympathy, not charity or patronage, had been reached across the chasm of her poverty, and by it she justly hoped that she might be led into new relations that would bring light and color into her shadowed experience. With her mother and Belle she went to the chapel on the following Sunday afternoon, and found her new friend on the watch for them. The building was plain but substantial, and the audience-room large and cheerful looking. Mr. Woolling was, in truth, not the type of the tall, rugged-featured man who sat on the platform pulpit, and Mildred, at first, was not prepossessed in his favor, but as he rose and began to speak she felt the magnetism of a large heart and brain; and when he began to preach she found herself yielding to the power of manly Christian thought, expressed in honest Saxon words devoid of any trace of affectation, scholasticism, and set phraseology. He spoke as any sensible, practical man would speak concerning a subject in which he believed thoroughly and was deeply interested, and he never once gave the impression that he was "delivering a sermon" which was foreordained to be delivered at that hour. It was a message rather than a sermon, a sincere effort to make the people understand just what God wished them to know concerning the truth under consideration, and especially what they were to do in view of it. The young girl soon reached the conclusion that the religion taught in this chapel was not something fashioned to suit the world, but a controlling principle that brought the rich and poor together in their obedience to Him whose perfect life will ever be the law of the Christian Church. The attention of even mercurial Belle was obtained and held, and at the close of the address she whispered, "Millie, that man talks right to one, and not fifty miles over your head. I'll come here every Sunday if you will."