s she is
now? Wasn't there ever a time when she could hear, or speak, or see?"

Bennie winked back a suspicion of tears before he answered. Rose-Marie,
who found herself almost forgetting the episode of the kitten, liked him
better for the tears. "Yes, Miss," he told her, "she was born all
healthy, Ma says. But she had a sickness--when she was a baby. An' she
ain't been right since!"

They walked the rest of the way in silence--a silence of untold depth.
But it was that silent walk, Rose-Marie felt afterward, that cemented the
strange affection that had sprung suddenly into flower between them. As
they said good-bye, in front of the brownstone stoop of the Settlement
House, there was none of the usual restraint that exists between a child
and a grown-up. And when Rose-Marie asked Bennie, quite as a matter of
course, to come to some of their boys' clubs he assented in a manner as
casual as her own.

* * * * *

As she sat down to dinner, that night, Rose-Marie was beaming with
happiness and the pride of achievement. The Superintendent, tired after
the day's work, noticed her radiance with a wearily sympathetic
smile--the Young Doctor, coming in briskly from his round of calls, was
aware of her pink cheeks and her sparkling eyes. All at once he realized
that Rose-Marie was a distinct addition to the humdrum life of the place;
that she was like a sweet old-fashioned garden set down in the gardenless
slums. He started to say something of the sort before he remembered that
a quarrel lay, starkly, between them.

Rose-Marie, herself, could scarcely have told why she was so bubbling
over with gladness. When she left the tenement home of the Volskys she
had been exceedingly depressed, when she parted from Bennie at the
Settlement House steps she had been ready to cry. But the hours between
that parting and dinnertime had brought her a sort of assurance, a sort
of joyous bravery. She felt that at last she had found her true vocation,
her real place in the sun. The Volsky family presented to her a very
genuine challenge.

She glanced, covertly, at the Young Doctor. He was eating soup, and no
man is at his best while eating soup. And yet as she watched him, she
considered very seriously whether she should tell him of her adventure.
His skill might, perhaps, find some way out for Lily, who had not been
born a mute, who had come into the world with seeing eyes. Bennie had
told her that the child's