them, striving with almost passionate earnestness to show them how to
make the best of the poor thing they called life. Gradually his efforts
began to tell upon himself. He grew thinner, there were shadows under
his eyes, a curious intangible depression seemed to settle upon him.
Holderness one night sought him out and insisted upon dinner together.

"Look here, Victor," he said, "I have a bone to pick with you. You'd
better listen! Don't sit there staring round the place as though you saw
ghosts everywhere."

Macheson smiled mirthlessly.

"But that is just what I do see," he answered. "The conscience of every
man who knows must be haunted with them! The ghosts of starving men and
unsexed women! What keeps their hands from our throats, Dick?"

"Common sense, you idiot," Holderness answered cheerfully. "There's a
refuse heap for every one of nature's functions. You may try to rake it
out and cleanse it, but there isn't much to be done. Hang that mission
work, Victor! It's broken more hearts than anything else on earth! A man
can but do what he may."

"The refuse heap is man's work!" Macheson muttered.

"But not wholly his responsibility," Holderness declared. "We're part of
the machine, but remember the wheels are driven by fate, or God, or
whatever the hidden motive force of the universe may be. Don't lose
yourself, Macheson! Sentiment's a good thing under control. It's a
sickly master."

"You call it sentiment, if one feels the horror of this garbage heap!
Come to-night and look into their faces."

"I've done it," Holderness declared. "I've been through it all. Hang it
all, do you forget that I'm the editor of a Socialist magazine? No! feel
it you must, but don't let it upset your mental balance. Don't lose your
values!"

Macheson left his friend in a saner frame of mind. His words came back
to him that night as he watched the little stream of people file out
from the bare white-washed building, with its rows of cheap cane chairs.
It was so true! To give way to despair was simply to indulge in a
sentimental debauch. Yet in a sense he had never felt so completely the
pitiful ineffectiveness of his task. How could he preach the Christian
morality, expound the Christian doctrines, to a people whose very
sufferings, whose constant agony, was a hideous and glaring proof that
by the greater part of the world those doctrines were ignored!

A man was shown into his room afterwards, as he was putting on his
overco