en.

In answer to her knock the door swung open--a little way. The glow of a
dingy lamp fell about her, through the opening--she felt suddenly as if
she had been swept, willy-nilly, before the footlights of some hostile
stage. For a moment she stood blinking. And as she stood there, quite
unable to see, she heard the voice of Bennie Volsky, speaking in a
hoarse whisper.

"It's you, Miss!" said the voice, and it was as full of intense
wonderment as a voice could be. "I never thought that you'd come--I
didn't think you was on th' level. So many folks say they'll do things--"
he broke off, and then--"Walk in, quiet," he told her slowly. "Don't make
any noise, if yer can help it! Pa's come home, all lit up. An' he's
asleep, in th' corner! There'll be--" he broke off--"There'll be th'
dickens t' pay, if Pa wakes up! But walk in, still-like. An' yer can see
Ma an' all, an'--_Lily_!"

Rose-Marie, whose eyes had now become accustomed to the dim light,
stepped past the boy and into the room. Her hand, in passing, touched his
arm lightly, for she knew that he was labouring under intense excitement.
She stepped into the room, on mousy-quiet feet--and then, with a quick
gasp, drew back again.

Never, in her wildest dreams of poverty, had Rose-Marie supposed that
squalor, such as she saw in the Volsky home, could exist. Never had she
supposed that a family could live in such cramped, airless quarters.
Never had she thought that filth, such as she saw in the room, was
possible. It all seemed, somehow, an unbelievably bad dream--a dream in
which she was appearing, with startling realism. Her comfortable picture
of a home was vanishing--vanishing as suddenly and completely as a soap
bubble vanishes, if pricked by a pin.

"Why--why, Bennie!" she began. But the child was not listening. He had
darted from her side and was dragging forward, by one listless,
work-coarsened hand, a pallid, drooping woman.

"Dis is my ma," he told Rose-Marie. "She didn't know yer was comin'. I
didn't tell her!"

It seemed to Rose-Marie that there was a scared sort of appeal in the
woman's eyes as they travelled, slowly, over her face. But there was
not even appeal in the tone of her voice--it was all a drab,
colourless monotone.

"Whatcha come here fer?" she questioned. "Pa, he's home. If he should ter
wake up--" She left the sentence unfinished.

Almost instinctively the eyes of Rose-Marie travelled past the figure
of Mrs. Volsky. There was nothi