Early one evening Stargarde was sitting sewing in her room when she heard on the veranda the blustering noise that usually accompanied Dr. Camperdown’s arrival. She smiled and glanced apprehensively at Zeb, who had been spending the day with her, and who now lay on the sofa apparently asleep.

Then she dropped her work and turned to greet the newcomer.

“No, thank you, I can’t sit down,” he said. “I came to bring you some money that Mr. Warner handed me for your poor people. Here it is,” and taking out his pocket-book he handed her a check. “You’d better spend some of it on that little mudlark of yours,” with a nod of his head in the direction of the sofa.

Zeb, who was only pretending to be asleep, heard the half-contemptuous half-good-natured epithet, and like a flash she was off the sofa and clinging to his arm, scratching, snarling, and biting at him like an enraged cat.

Stargarde was intensely distressed, and Dr. Camperdown was electrified. Around and around the table he went, trying to shake the child off without hurting her, and yet becoming more and more disturbed as he heard the ripping of cloth.

“Stop, stop—you little fury,” he exclaimed. “Let go! I’ll have to hurt you, I see,” and bending back the child’s fingers in his powerful hands he dropped her on the floor gently, but as hastily as if she were a rat, and snatching at his hat hurried to the door.

He flung it open and rushed out, none too soon, however, for the child was at his heels. Across the veranda and out under the archway they dashed, and Stargarde, hastening to watch them, heard their hurrying footsteps echoing down the frosty street. Used to surprising scenes of all kinds she was not unduly alarmed, and thoughtfully smoothing out the check and murmuring, “Poor little Zeb,” she sat down to write a note of thanks.

After some time there was a cautious knock at the door, then a head was thrust slowly in, which, to her surprise, she saw belonged to Dr. Camperdown.

“Are you alone?” he said. “Has that—that little witch come back? If she has I won’t come in.”

“No, she hasn’t.”

Camperdown advanced into the room making a wry face. “I have been robbed.”

“Brian!”

“Yes; that small darling of yours has made off with my pocket-book.”

“Impossible, Brian!” exclaimed Stargarde clasping her hands.

“Not so,” he retorted coolly. “She has it. I was on my way to the police station, but changed my mind and thought I’d come here first.”

“Brian, I cannot have her arrested.”

“Very well; then get my property from her. There are papers in that book worth a large sum to me. I’ve traveled half over the world and carried a pocket full of notes here, there, and everywhere, and never was robbed before.”

Stargarde suddenly became calm. “Sit down and let us talk it over.”

He gave utterance to his favorite exclamation, “Good—there’s considerable of the detective about you, Stargarde, and you’ve had experience with people of this stripe. Now what shall we do?”

She smiled feebly at him. “Where did you keep your pocket-book, Brian?”

He displayed a well of a pocket in his inside coat situated immediately over his brawny chest. “Impossible to fall out you see. Put your hand in.”

“Oh, I can see; do you always keep it there?”

“Always.”

“When did you have it last?”

“When I took it out to give you the check. I had the book half-way back into my pocket when the young lamb sprang upon me. You remember how she grabbed and dived at me—wanted to tear her way to my heart, I think. Probably she snatched the book and concealed it among her rags.”

SheShe had no rags to conceal it among," said Stargarde reproachfully; “she had on a decent frock.”

“Well, what is your theory?” he said impatiently.

“She was angry and thought only of punishing you. The book must have fallen from your coat as you ran and she picked it up and is keeping it to tease you.”

“I will tease her,” grimly, “if she doesn’t give it up. Come, what shall we do? Get a policeman?”

“No, Brian, I will get it for you,” and she left him and went into her bedroom and put her hand to her head with a swift ejaculation, “O Lord, give me wisdom. They are terrible people—her parents. If they find the book on her they will not give it up.”

She looked around the room as if for inspiration. “I have it,” she said, snatching a little box from her dressing table. “Thank God for putting it into the hearts of kind friends to send me the wherewithal to do good.” Then taking a hat and cloak from a drawer, and rolling Zeb’s cap and shawl in a parcel, she went out to Dr. Camperdown and said quietly, “I am ready.”

He held open the door for her, and looked down approvingly at the large black dog that went silently out with his nose against her skirts.

They went up a street leading to the Citadel Hill, which crouched in the midst of the city like some huge animal turned stiff in the cold, its flanks covered with yellow, tufted, frozen grass, the great crown of the fort resting solidly on its brow. A few lights flashed at the top of the signal staff but the grim fortification sunk in the ground was outwardly dark and gloomy, though within they knew there were lights and fires and soldiers keeping ceaseless watch.

Near the Citadel was a tenement house, inhabited by nearly twenty persons. Stargarde knew them all, knew just which rooms they occupied, and on arriving in front of the building, she refused to allow Camperdown to accompany her within.

Very unwillingly he consented to stay outside, a little comforted to see that the dog slunk in after her like her shadow. Stargarde had requested him not to linger by the door, so he walked up and down the opposite side of the street, where there were no houses, surveying moodily sometimes the frozen glacis on one side of him, and sometimes the gaudy windows of the little eating and drinking shops on the other. A few soldiers in greatcoats passed at intervals up and down the street, but always across from him, and occasionally a man or a gayly dressed girl would swing open a shop door and let a stream of music and a smell of cooking food out on the night air.

While he waited, he mourned angrily and bitterly, as he had done a thousand times before, the passion, or credulity, or madness, or whatever it was, that took his pure, white lily into such houses as these. “Those people are well enough off,” he muttered angrily; “why can’t she let them alone? They live their life, we live ours. She thinks she can raise them up. Pah! as easily as rats from a gutter.”

He grumbled on mercifully unconscious of the fact that could he have seen Stargarde at the time his uneasiness would not have been allayed.

The old tenement house was one of the worst in the city, and when Stargarde entered it, she knew she must step cautiously. Passing through the doorway she found herself in a narrow, unlighted hall, not evil-smelling, for the door had been partly ajar, but as cold as the outer world, and with an uneven floorway, almost covered by an accumulation of ice and snow brought in during many days by many feet, and that would linger till a thaw came to melt it.

At the back of the hall was a sound of running water, where the occupants of the house, with a glorious disregard of the waste, kept their tap running to save it from freezing. Beyond the tap Stargarde knew she must not go, for there was a large hole in the floor utilized as a receptacle for the refuse and garbage of the house, which were thrown through it into the cellar. As for the cellar itself, it was entirely open to the winter winds. The windows had been torn away, part of the foundation wall was crumbling, and over the rickety floor she could hear the rats scampering merrily, busy with their evening feast.

Stargarde avoided the icy sink, the running water, and the crazy steps that led to the cellar, and guiding herself along the hall by touching the wall with the tips of her outstretched fingers, put her foot on the lowest step of the staircase. Carefully she crept up one flight of stairs after another, past walls flecked with ugly sores, where the plaster had fallen off in patches, past empty sockets of windows staring out at the night with glass and sash both gone, and past the snowdrifts lying curled beneath on the floor.

On two flats she passed by doors where threads of light streamed out and lay across the rotten boards, while a sound of laughter and rough merrymaking was heard within.

In the third, the top flat, there was no noise at all. “Foreigners they are, and queer in their ways,” ejaculated Stargarde; and pausing an instant to listen for some sign of life, she lifted up her face to the crazy, moldy roof overhead, where some of the shingles were gone, affording easy ingress to snow and rain, which kept the floor beneath her feet in a state of perpetual dampness.

“Iniquitous!” she murmured; “judgment falls on the city that neglects its poor.” Then bringing down her glance to the doors before her, she sighed heavily and proceeded a little farther along the hall. There were three rooms in this story, and Zeb’s parents lived in the front one. Their door had been broken in some quarrel between the people of the house, and one whole panel was gone. There was a garment clumsily tacked over it, and Stargarde might have pulled it aside if she had been so minded; but she had not come to spy upon her protÉgÉs, and contented herself with knocking gently.

The very slight, almost inaudible, sound of voices that she had been able to hear within the room instantly ceased; after a short interval a voice asked her in excellent English who she was and what she wanted.

“Miss Turner,” she replied good-humoredly, “and I should like to see Zeb for a few minutes.”

The door was opened part way, and she was sullenly motioned to enter by a tall woman, who slipped behind it so as to be partly unobserved, giving her visitor as she did so a look which certainly would have attracted Stargarde’s attention could she have seen it, so blended with a curious variety of emotions was it.

They were having a quiet carousal Stargarde saw, when she found herself in the room. There was a tearing fire in the stove, and on its red-hot top foamed and bubbled a kettle of boiling water. The windows were tightly closed and draped with dirty garments; a small table, having on it candles, a pack of cards, and a jug of steaming liquor, stood at one side of the room, and beside it sat two men, both foreigners, judging by their swarthy faces and plentiful supply of silky, black hair.

They were very drunk, but the woman was only partly so. The men eyed Stargarde in insulting, brutish curiosity, hurling interjections, remarks, and questions at her in a gibberish which she fortunately could not understand.

She paid little attention to them. Her eyes leaped beyond to the dirty bed on the floor, and held a pair of glittering orbs that she knew belonged to the child of whom she had come in search. She did not wish Zeb to have one instant to herself in which to secrete the pocket-book. The child had pulled about her some of the rags with which she was surrounded, and was sitting up, looking like a wild animal disturbed in its lair.

Stargarde crossed the room quickly and knelt down beside her. “You ran away from me this evening,” she whispered; “see, darling,” and opening a box she showed the child a layer of sweetmeats daintily wrapped in colored paper.

“Take one, Zeb,” she said, and the child silently submitted to have one put in her mouth. “Now I must go,” said Stargarde; “you keep this pretty box, and will you come and see me to-morrow?”

“Mebbe,” said the child sullenly, and taking another sweetmeat.

Stargarde’s heart beat fast. The girl was an enigma to her in her moody self-possession. Perhaps she had not taken the pocket-book. “Goodbye, Zeb,” she murmured, making as though she would rise from the floor. “Have you no present for me? I thought you might have.”

Zeb flashed her a look, half cunning, half admiring. “You’re a quaint one,” she observed in Italian patois; then she displayed her sharp, white teeth in a mirthless smile: “If you’ll give me a kiss.”

Stargarde leaned over and took the child in a capacious embrace, and as she did so, felt something flat slipped into the bosom of her dress. “Is it all there?” she murmured in Zeb’s ear; “you haven’t taken anything out?”

“Pas si bÊte,” returned the child. “Not I. Think I want to cool my heels in the little saint? I was goin’ to fetch it in the mornin’; but you take the curlyhead back his sacred. I don’t want it. It danced out of his pocket. Some day,” coolly, “I’ll pick him. He’s a——I’d like to see his grape jam running,” with an oath and sudden darkening of face. Stargarde was familiar with some of the slang of recidivists collected together in large cities, but she had never before the advent of Zeb’s parents heard it in the small city of Halifax. With a sensation of poignant and intense grief she looked at the child who, whether it was due to her environment or not, was talking more of it this evening than she had ever heard from her before.

“Curlyhead,” Stargarde knew, meant Jew; “little saint,” prison; “sacred,” purse; and “grape jam” was blood. Oh, to get the child away from here, from the choking, stifling atmosphere of poverty and vice that was ruining her!

Zeb, as if aware of her distress, had curled herself up sullenly among the rags, and Stargarde rose to her feet and turned to speak to her mother.

In a corner of the room she found an extraordinary scene being enacted. Unknown to her, while she bent over Zeb, the younger of the two men had managed to stagger quietly from his seat and stand behind her, divided between an admiration for her magnificent physique, such a contrast to his own puny strength, and an endeavor to keep on his tottering legs.

The gravely watchful dog that had walked into the room behind his mistress, and lay curled on the floor beside her, saw nothing hostile in the man’s attitude, and beyond keeping an observing eye upon him took no measures to make him retreat.

Not so sensible was the woman behind the door. For some reason or other she was highly displeased with the proceeding of the young man. Springing upon him as silently and as stealthily as a wild beast of the cat tribe would have done, she hissed in his ear, “Not for you to look at, Camaro; back! back!” and she motioned him to his seat.

He had reached the obstinate stage of drunkenness, and though a little fear of her shone out of his black and beady eyes, he shrugged his shoulders carelessly, and said in Italian, “Presently, presently, my lady.”

“Not presently, but now,” said the woman in pure and correct English, and having taken enough of the fiery liquor to be thoroughly quarrelsome, she threw herself upon him, dragged him to a corner where, when Stargarde turned around, she was quietly and persistently beating him with a stick of wood that she had caught from beside the stove.

Her husband sat stupidly watching her from the table, his hand going more and more frequently to the jug; and her victim, making not the slightest effort to withstand her, lay taking his beating as a submissive child might resign itself to deserved punishment from a parent.

“Stop, stop!” exclaimed Stargarde, hurrying to her side. “That’s enough, Zeb’s mother”—and throwing her cloak back over her shoulders she laid her hand on the woman’s club.

“He insulted you,” exclaimed the woman in maudlin fury, “I shall punish him.”

Stargarde towered above her, strong and firm and beautiful, and would not release her. “Who are you?” she said in surprise. “You speak Italian and French, and now good English; I thought you were Zeb’s mother.”

“So I be,” said the woman sulkily, relapsing into inelegant language, and pulling her hair over her eyes so that Stargarde could not see her features distinctly. “Here, give me that stick,” and seeing that Stargarde would not obey her, she began beating the man with her fists.

“Oh, this is dreadful,” gasped Stargarde, holding her back and gazing around the room, half choked by the heat, which was bringing out and developing a dozen different odors, each fouler than the last. “How can I leave Zeb here? Give me the child, won’t you?” she said pleadingly to the woman.

“No, no,” and a stream of foreign ejaculations and asseverations poured from the woman’s lips, in which the man at the table, comprehending dully what was said, hastened to add his quota.

Stargarde turned to look at him, and found that he was fondling tenderly a little monkey that had crept to his bosom. She remembered hearing Zeb say that her father loved his monkey and would feed it if they all had to go hungry.

“Sweet, Pedro, thou art beautiful,” he murmured, and Stargarde seeing that he cared nothing for the friend whom his wife was so unmercifully beating, knew that she must not relax in her protection of the unfortunate one, or there might be broken bones, and possibly loss of life before morning.

“You were kind to want to protect me,” she said, catching the woman’s wrists in her hands and holding them firmly; “but you should not beat the man. He would not have hurt me. I am never afraid of drunken people. See, I will take him away from you,” and sliding her hand under the little man’s shirt collar she slipped him swiftly over the floor to the doorway. Strong and muscular, and a trained athlete though she was a woman, she did easily in cool blood what the other woman had only been able to do in her rage.

Zeb’s mother precipitating herself upon her, hindered her from opening the door, till Zeb sprang from the bed and addressed her unreasoning parent in an eager jargon, in which Stargarde knew she plainly told her of the evil consequences which would arise from the indulgence of her wrath.

The woman, not too far gone to be amenable to reason, came so quickly to her daughter’s view of the matter that she even gave the now insensible man several helping kicks to assist Stargarde in dragging him out into the hall. Stargarde going ahead, slid him down the few steps to the next landing, where she laid his head on a bed of snow, and bound her handkerchief around an ugly cut on his wrist.

Before she finished, the woman exclaimed at the cold wind sweeping through the hall, and went into the room; but Zeb remained, watching and shivering, though she had on all the clothes she had worn through the day.

“Zeb,” exclaimed Stargarde passionately, looking up at her, “how can I leave you here? I shall not sleep to-night for thinking of you.”

The child shrugged her shoulders, but said nothing.

“Will you not come with me, darling?” said Stargarde. “I think your mother would give you up.”

“Yer’ll marry that——” Zeb scorned to bestow a name upon him; “then where’ll I find myself?”

“My present plan is to live always in the Pavilion,” said Stargarde firmly; “and Zeb, I want you with me.”

Zeb relented a little. “I’ll see yer to-morrer,” she observed at length. “I’m tired o’ this kind o’ thing,” pointing contemptuously at the prostrate man.

“And Zeb,” continued Stargarde, as the girl showed signs of leaving her, “do open a window in there; the air is stifling.”

Zeb chuckled. “So I does, every night. In an hour them,” with a jerk of her finger over her shoulder, “will be sound off. Then I jumps up and opens both winders, ’cause I likes fresh air. Goodnight to ye,” and with a farewell glance at Stargarde she slammed the crazy door behind her and went into the room.