It was on the day following the dancing party at the Calmaines' that Constance Elliott arrayed herself in a modest street dress, and ran down to the library where Miss Van Vetter was writing letters.

"You'd better change your mind, Myra, and come along with me. It'll do you good to see how the other half lives," she said coaxingly.

Miss Van Vetter calmly finished her sentence before she replied.

"Thank you, Connie; but I believe not. I know it is the proper fad nowadays to go slumming, but I can't do it; it's a matter of principle with me."

Connie's eyebrows arched in mild surprise. "That's a new one," she commented. "I've heard all kinds of excuses, but never that. How do you diagram it?"

"It is simple enough. One sees plenty of misery in the ordinary course of things without making a specialty of looking for it; and when you've done everything that your money and sympathy can do, it is only a single drop in the great ocean of human wretchedness, after all. More than that, you have added to the sum total of the world's suffering by just so much as the miseries of the others hurt you through your compassion."

"Myra, dear, if I didn't know that you are better than your theories, I should try to humble you. What will you do if the evil day ever comes to you?"

"Unload my woes upon some such angelic and charitable sister of mercy as you are, I suppose," rejoined Miss Van Vetter complacently. "But that doesn't make it necessary for me to go about and shed literal tears with those who weep, now. I prefer to do it by proxy." She took a gold piece from her purse and offered it to Constance. "Take this, and make some poor wretch comfortable for ten or fifteen minutes on my account."

Miss Elliott was not yet canonized, and she refused the contribution with an indignant little stamp of her foot. "Myra Van Vetter, you're worse than a heathen! I wouldn't touch your money with the tip of my finger; I'd be afraid it would burn me. I hope you'll learn for yourself some day what the cold shoulder of charity is—there!" And she swept out of the room with as much dignity as five-feet-one-and-a-half may compass upon extraordinary occasions.

Once on the other side of the library door, she laughed softly to herself and was instantly Connie the serene again.

"It does me a whole lot of good to boil over once in a while," she said, going out on the veranda. "Myra serves one beneficent end in the cosmogony in spite of herself: she's a perfect safety-valve for me. Tommie-e-e-e! O Tom! Are you out there?"

A ragged boy, sitting on the curb and shaking dice with a pair of pebbles, sprang up and ran to the gate. When the latch baffled him, as it usually did from the outside, he vaulted the fence and stood before her.

"Prompt as usual, aren't you, Tommie?"

"Ain't got nothin' else to do but to be promp'. Is it a baskit, dis time, 'r wot?"

"It's a basket, and you'll find it in the kitchen."

Five minutes later the dwellers in the avenue might have seen a small procession headed townwards. Its component parts were a dainty little lady, walking very straight with her hands in the pockets of her jacket, and a ragged urchin bent sidewise against the weight of a capacious basket.

The street-car line was convenient, but Constance walked in deference to Tommie's convictions,—he objected to the car on the score of economy. "Wot's the use o' givin' a bloated corp'ration a nickel w'en a feller can mog along on his feets?" he had demanded, one day; and thereafter they walked.

What profits it to set down in measured phrase at what numbers in what streets the basket cover was lifted that afternoon? Doubtless, in that great day when the books shall be opened, it will be found that a faithful record has been kept, not only of the tumbler of jelly left with bedridden Mother M'Garrihan, the bottle of wine put into the hands of gaunt Tom Devins, who was slowly dying of lead-poisoning, and the more substantial viands spread out before the hungry children in drunken Owen David's shanty, but of all the other deeds of mercy that left a trail of thankful benisons in the wake of the small procession. Be it sufficient to say that the round was a long one, and that Constance spared neither herself nor her father's bank-account where she found misery with uplifted hands.

The basket had grown appreciably lighter, and Tommie's body was once more approaching the perpendicular, when the procession paused before an unswept stairway leading to the second story of a building fronting on one of the lower cross streets. Constance held out her hand for the basket, but the boy put it behind him.

"Wot's the matter with me?" he demanded.

"Nothing at all, Tommie. I only meant to save you a climb. The basket isn't heavy now, you know."

"S'posin' it ain't; ain't I hired to run this end o' the show? You jes' tell me where you want it put, an' that's right where I'm goin' to put it, an' not nowheres else."

She smiled and let him lead the way up the dusty stair. At a certain door near the end of the long upper corridor she signed to him to give her the basket. "Go to the head of the stairs and wait," she whispered. "I may want you."

When he was out of hearing she tapped on the door and went in. It was the interior of all others that made Constance want to cry. There was a sufficiency of garish furniture and tawdry knickknacks scattered about to show that it was not the dwelling-place of the desperately poor; but these were only the accessories to the picture of desolation and utter neglect having for its central figure the woman stretched out upon the bed. She was asleep, and her face was turned toward the light which struggled feebly through the unwashed window. Beauty there had been, and might be again, but not even the flush of health would efface the marks of Margaret Gannon's latest plunge into the chilling depths of human indifference. Connie tiptoed to the bedside and looked, and her heart swelled within her.

It had fallen out in this wise. On the Monday night Mademoiselle Angeline—known to her intimates as Mag Gannon—saw fuzzy little circles expand and contract around the gas-jets in the Bijou Theatre while she was walking through her part in the farce. Tuesday night the fuzzy circles became blurs; and the stage manager swore audibly when she faltered and missed the step in her specialty. On the Wednesday Mademoiselle Angeline disappeared from the Bijou altogether; and for three days she had lain helpless and suffering, seeing no human face until Constance came and ministered to her. And the pity of it was that while the fever wrought its torturous will upon her, delirium would not come to help her to forget that she was forgotten.

Constance had pieced out the pitiful story by fragments while she was dragging the woman back from the brink of the pit; and when all was said, she began to understand that a sick soul demands other remedies than drugs and dainties. Just what they were, or how they were to be applied, was another matter; but Constance grappled with the problem as ardently as if no one had ever before attacked it. In her later visits she always brought the conversation around to Margaret's future; and on the afternoon of the basket-procession, after she had made her patient eat and drink, she essayed once again to enlist the woman's will in her own behalf.

"It's no use of me trying, Miss Constance; I've got to go back when I'm fit. There ain't nothing else for the likes of me to do."

"How can you tell till you try? O Margaret, I wish you would try!"

A smile of hard-earned wisdom flitted across the face of the woman. "You know more than most of 'em," she said, "but you don't know it all. You can't, you see; you're so good the world puts on its gloves before it touches you. But for the likes of me, we get the bare hand, and we're playing in luck if it ain't made into a fist."

"You poor girl! It makes my heart ache to think what you must have gone through before you could learn to say a thing like that. But you must try; I can't let you go back to that awful place after what you've told me about it."

"Supposing I did try; there's only the one thing on earth I know how to do,—that's trim hats. Suppose you run your pretty feet off till you found me a place where I could work right. How long would it be before somebody would go to the missis, or the boss, or whoever it might be, and say, 'See here; you've got one of Pete Grim's Bijou women in there. That won't do.' And the night after, I'd be doing my specialty again, if I was that lucky to get on."

"But you could learn to do housework, or something of that kind, so you could keep out of the way of people who would remember you. You must have had some experience."

The invalid rocked her head on the pillow. "That'd be worse than the other. Somebody'd be dead sure to find out and tell; and then I'd be lucky if I got off without going to jail. And for the experience,—a minute ago you called me a girl, but I know you didn't mean it. How old do you think I am?"

Constance looked at the fever-burned face, and tried to make allowances for the ravages of disease. "I should say twenty-five," she replied, "only you talk as if you might be older."

"I'll be eighteen next June, if I'd happen to live that long," said Margaret; and Constance went home a few minutes later with a new pain in her heart, born of the simple statement.

At the gate she took the empty basket and paid the boy. "That's all for to-day, but I want to give you some more work," she said. "Every morning, and every noon, and every night, until I tell you to stop, I want you to go up to that last place and ask Margaret Gannon if there is anything you can do for her. And if she says yes, you do it; and if it's too big for you to do, you come right up here after me. Will you do all that?"

"Will I? Will a yaller dorg eat his supper w'en he's hungry? You're jes' dead right I'll do it. An' I'll be yere to-morrer afternoon, promp'."

All of which was well enough in its way, but the problem was yet unsolved, and Constance had to draw heavily on her reserves of cheerfulness to be able to make an accordant one of four when Richard Bartrow called that evening after dinner.