accused of some crime. But she
dismissed the idea quickly--his composure was too real to be born of
bravado. It was while her brain groped for some new solution that she
became conscious of Mrs. Volsky's voice.

"Oh, he ain't," the woman was moaning, "say he ain't! My man--he could
not be so! There ain't no truth in it--there can't be no truth.... Say as
he ain't been done to so bad! Say it!"

Ella, with a movement that was all at once love-filled, stepped quickly
to her mother's side. As she faced the crowd--and Jim--her face was also
drawn; drawn and apprehensive.

"What's up?" she queried tersely of her brother. "What's up?"

The face of Jim was calm and almost smiling as he answered. Behind him
the shrill voices of the crowd sounded, like a background, to the blunt
words that he spoke.

"Pa was comin' home drunk," he told Ella, "an' he was ran inter by a
truck. He was smashed up pretty bad; dead right away, th' cop said. But
they took him ter a hospital jus' th' same. Wonder why they'd take a
stiff ter a hospital?"

Mrs. Volsky's usually colourless voice was breaking into loud, almost
weird lamentation. Ella stood speechless. But Rose-Marie, the horror of
it all striking to her very soul, spoke.

"It can't be true," she cried, starting forward and--in the excitement of
the moment--laying her hand upon Jim's perfectly tailored coat sleeve.
"It can't be true.... It's too terrible!"

Jim's laugh rang out heartlessly, eerily, upon the air.

"It ain't so terrible!" he told Rose-Marie. "Pa--he wasn't no good! He
wasn't a reg'lar feller--like me." All at once his well-manicured white
hand crept down over her hand. "_He wasn't a reg'lar feller_," he
repeated, "_like me_!"

XV

A SOLUTION

As Rose-Marie left the Volsky flat--Ella had begged her to go; had
assured her that it would be better to leave Mrs. Volsky to her
inarticulate grief--her brain was in a whirl. Things had happened, in the
last few hours, with a kaleidoscopic rapidity--the whirl of events had
left her mind in a dazed condition. She told herself, over and over, that
Ella was saved. But she found it hard to believe that Ella would ever
find happiness, despite her salvation, in the grim tenement that was her
home. She told herself that Bennie was learning to travel the right
road--that the Scout Club would be the means of leading him to other
clubs and that the other clubs would, in time, introduce him to
Sunday-school and to the church