s on the very next morning. Julia found this first
experience an ordeal; she and Miss Toland were in a side pew before the
big gong struck, and Julia did not raise her eyes from her book as the
girls filed in. The steady rustle of frocks and shuffle of feet made her
feel cold and sick.

A day or two later she could watch them, although never without profound
emotion. Two hundred girls, ranging in years from ten to twenty, with
roughly clipped hair, and the hideous gray-green checked aprons of the
institution. Two hundred faces, sullen or vacuous, pretty, silly faces,
hard faces, faces tragically hopeless and pale. These young things were
offenders against the law, shut away here behind iron bars for the good
of the commonwealth. Julia, whose life had made her wise beyond her
years, watched them and pondered. Here was an almost babyish face; what
did that innocent-looking twelve-year-old think of life, now that she
had thrown her own away? Here was a sickly looking girl a few years
older, coughing incessantly and ashen cheeked; why had some woman borne
her in deathly anguish, loved her and watched her through the years that
least need loving and watching? This thing that they had all done--this
treasure they had all thrown away--what did they think about it?

She would come out very soberly into the convent garden, and walk home,
through the delicious airs of a spring morning, without speaking,
perhaps to break out, over her belated coffee:

"Oh, I think it's horrible--their being shut up there, the poor little
things!"

"They have sensible work, plenty to eat, and they're safe," Miss Toland
might answer severely. "And that's a great deal more than they deserve!"

"Nobody worried about them until it was too late," Julia suggested once,
in great distress. "Lots of them never would have done anything wrong if
they'd had work and food _then_!"

"Well, the nuns are very kind to them," Miss Toland answered
comfortably; and Julia knew this was true, as far as possible.

One morning, when Julia slipped into her place in St. Anne's, she saw,
two feet away from her, on an undraped trestle, a narrow coffin, and in
the coffin the rigid form of a girl who had been prayed for a few
mornings earlier as very ill. There was not a flower on the still, flat
young breast, and no kindly artifice beautified the stern face or the
bare, raw little hands that protruded from the blue-green gingham
sleeves. The ruined little tenement that