oked over her shoulder she saw that the pavement was
nearly bare of walkers.

At last the broad thoroughfare narrowed to a point where four streets
converged. Agnes glanced fearfully this way and that. Which of those
shadowy black-coated figures hurrying past, intent on their business,
would direct her rightly? Within the last half-hour Agnes had grown
horribly afraid of men.

And then, with more relief than the fact warranted, across the narrow
roadway she saw emerge, between two parting waves of fog, the shrouded
figure of a woman leaning against a dead wall.

Agnes crossed the street, but as she stepped up on to the kerb, suddenly
there broke from her, twice repeated, a low, involuntary cry of dread.

"Teresa!" she cried. And then, again, "Teresa!" For in the shrouded
figure before her she had recognized, with a thrill of incredulous
terror, the form and lineaments of Teresa Maldo.

But there came no answering cry; and Agnes gave a long, gasping,
involuntary sigh of relief as she realized that what had seemed to be
her dead friend's dark, glowing face was the face of a little child--a
black-haired beggar child, with large startled eyes wide open on a
living world.

The tall woman whose statuesque figure had so strangely recalled
Teresa's supple, powerful form was holding up the child, propping it on
the wall behind her.

Still shaking with the chill terror induced by the vision she now
believed she had not seen, Agnes went up closer to the melancholy group.

Even now she longed to hear the woman speak. "Can you tell me the way to
Flood Street?" she asked.

The woman looked at her fixedly. "No, that I can't," she said
listlessly. "I'm a stranger here." And then, with a passionate energy
which startled Agnes, "For God's sake, give me something, lady, to help
me to get home! I've walked all the way from Essex; it's taken me, oh!
so long with the child, though we've had a lift here and a lift there,
and I haven't a penny left. I came to find my husband; but he's lost
himself--on purpose!"

A week ago, Agnes Barlow would have shaken her head and passed on. She
had always held the theory, carefully inculcated by her careful parents,
that it is wrong to give money to beggars in the street.

But perhaps the queer illusion that she had just experienced made her
remember Father Ferguson. In a flash she recalled a sermon of the old
priest's which had shocked and disturbed his prosperous congregation,
for in it the