* * * * *

At first her freedom--her release from the monotonous constraint of
her daily confinement at the Inn--the unaccustomed independence of her
new activities which justified her most untoward goings and
comings--was very soothing to her. She liked the feeling of slipping
out of the house at night, accountable to no one except the
redoubtable Hitty to whom she presented any explanation that happened
to occur to her,--however wide its departure from the actual
facts--and losing herself in the resurgent town. But after a while her
liberty lost its savor. She began to feel uncared for and neglected.
The unaccountable anguish in her breast was neither assuaged nor
mitigated by the geographical latitude she permitted herself. She kept
doggedly on with her personally conducted philanthropies, but she
began to feel a little frightened about her capacity for endurance.
Her body and brain began to show strange signs of fatigue. She was
afraid that one or the other might suddenly refuse to function.

One night, on coming out into the heterogeneous human stream on Avenue
A, after a visit to a Polish family in the model tenements on
Seventy-ninth Street, she ran into Dick.

"Why, Dick," she said, "what an extraordinary place to find you!"

"Yes, isn't it?" he said. "My business often brings me up this way."

"Your business? What business?" she asked incredulously.

"I don't know exactly what business it is. The ministering business, I
guess." He motioned toward the basket on her arm: "Let me carry that,
and you, too, if you'll let me, Nancy. You look tired."

"I am tired, Dick," she said. "Have you got a car anywhere around?"

"I can phone for it in two shakes," he said. "Here in this ice-cream
parlor. Can I buy you a cone while you're waiting?"

"Buy cones for that crowd of children and I'll watch them eat them.
Doesn't that little girl in the pink dress look like Sheila, Dick?"

She sank down on a stool in the interior of the candy shop and rested
her elbows on the damp marble table in front of her, splotched and
streaked still with the refreshment of the last customer who occupied
the seat there and watched the horde of dirty clamorous street
children devouring ice-cream cones and cheap sweets to the limit of
their capacity.

"I didn't know you believed in this promiscuous feeding of children
between meals," Dick said, when she was settled comfortably at last
among the cushions of hi