ng man was
speaking. Rose-Marie disliked, somehow, the very tone of his voice.

"Here's a girl t' see you, Ella," he said. "She's from th' Settlement
House--she says! Maybe she wants," sarcastically, "that you should join a
Bible Class!"

The girl's eyes were flashing with a dangerously hard light. She turned
angrily to Rose-Marie. But before she could say anything, the child,
Bennie, had interposed.

"She didn't come t' see _you_" he told his older sister--"she don't want
t' see you--like those other wimmen did. She come t' see _Lily_--"

He paused and Rose-Marie, who had gathered that social service workers
were not welcome visitors, went on breathlessly, from where he left off.

"I _am_ from the Settlement House," she told Ella, "and I'd like awfully
to have you join our classes. But that wasn't why I came here. Bennie
told me that he had a dear little sister. And I came to see her."

A change swept miraculously over Ella's cold face. Rose-Marie could see,
all at once, that she and her young brother were strikingly alike--that
Jim was the different one in this family.

"I'll get Lily," Ella said simply, and there was a warmth, a tenderness
in her dark eyes that had been so hard. "I didn't understand," she added,
as she went quickly past Rose-Marie and into the small inner room that
Bennie had said his sisters shared. In a moment she came out leading a
small girl by the hand.

"This is Lily!" she said softly.

Even in that dingy place--perhaps accentuated by the very dinginess of
it--Lily's blond loveliness struck Rose-Marie with a sense of shock. The
child might have been a flower--the very flower whose name she
bore--growing upon an ash heap. Her beauty made the rest of the room fade
into dim outlines--made Jim and Ella and Bennie seem heavy, and somehow
overfed. Even Pa, snoring lustily, became almost a shadow. Rose-Marie
stepped toward the child impulsively, with outflung arms.

"Oh, you dear!" she said shakily, "you dear!"

Nobody spoke. Only Ella, with gentle hands, pushed her little sister
forward. The child's great blue eyes looked past Rose-Marie, and a vague
smile quivered on her lips.

"Oh, you dear!" Rose-Marie exclaimed again, and went down on her knees on
the dirty floor--real women will always kneel before a beautiful child.

Lily might have been four years old. Her hair, drawn back from her white
little face, was the colour of pale gold, and her lips were faintly
coral. But it was her de