about her: up the street, down the street; he was
gone. It seemed to the girl that she could not go back to her
grandmother's house again; a disgust for everything and everybody in it
shook her from head to foot. She was sorry for them, her grandmother,
her cousins, but the simple fact remained that they could bear this sort
of existence and she could not; it was stifling her; it was killing her.

"If they minded things as I do they would change them, somehow!" said
Julia to herself, walking on blindly. "My grandmother should never have
let things get to such a pass--I can't bear it! The smells and the
fights--"

She stopped a car, one of the cable cars that ran out into the factory
district. Julia had no idea where she was going, nor did she care. She
got on because one of the small forward outside seats was empty, and she
could sit there comfortably. The car went on and on, through a less and
less populated district, but Julia, buried in unhappy thought, paid no
attention to route or neighbourhood.

"All off!" shouted the conductor presently. Julia had meant to keep her
seat for the return trip, but the man's glance at her young beauty
annoyed her, and she got off the car.

She walked aimlessly along a battered cement sidewalk, between
irregularly placed and shabby little houses. These were of too familiar
a type to interest Julia, but she presently came to a full stop before a
wide, one-story brick building, with a struggling garden separating it
from the street, and straggling window boxes at every one of the wide
windows. A flight of steps led up from the garden to the pretty white
front door, and a neat brass plate, screwed to the cement at the turn of
the steps, bore the words: "Alexander Toland Neighbourhood House."

It would have been a pretty house anywhere, with its crisp dotted muslin
curtains, its trim colonial walls, but in this particular neighbourhood
it had an added charm of contrast, and Julia stood before it literally
spellbound by admiration, and smitten, too, with that strange sick
fascination to which the mere name of Toland subjected her.

And while she stood there, Miss Anna Toland came to the door and stood
looking down at the street. Julia's heart began to beat very fast, and
the blood rushed to her face. She bowed, and Miss Toland bowed.

"Oh, Miss Page!" said Miss Toland then, crisply ready with the name and
the request. "This is very fortunate! I wonder if you won't come in and
help m