he had seen and heard. Mrs.
Donegan, with the other women to refresh her memory, had counted up
forty funerals which had taken place in Diamond Row in the eleven years
that she had lived under its leaky roof.

Mary was through supper that night when Sandford Berry strolled in.
"Well," he said, pausing to put his head in at the parlor door, where
she sat glancing over the evening paper. "What luck?"

"Oh, it was perfectly hideous!" she exclaimed, and proceeded to pour out
the story of her visit so indignantly that he nodded his approval.

"I see that you got your local color all right. It's fairly lurid."

"And I did something else," confessed Mary. "I tried to find the owner
of the place, Mr. Stoner, and paint the picture for him. But he was in
Europe. So was his wife. And then I found out who his agent was, and I
went to him and asked him why he didn't fix the place up. He was as
coolly polite as an iceberg, but he told me in so many words that it
was none of my business. That it was his business to look after the
interests of his employer and collect the rents, and not to humor the
whims of a few fussy women who had more sentiment than sense."

"Then what did _you_ say?" laughed Sandford.

Mary's eyes flashed angrily, and her cheeks grew redder and redder as
she talked.

"I told him it was not rents alone he was collecting, but blood-money,
and that the owner of that tenement was as responsible for the forty
deaths inside its walls as if he'd deliberately poisoned them. And I
told him I'd _make_ it my business from now on to see that the people
knew the truth about him. And then I got so mad that I knew I'd burst
out crying if I stayed another minute, so I flounced out and left him
staring after me open-mouthed, as if I'd flown at him and pecked him."

The reporter laughed again and started on towards the dining-room, but
paused to look back with a wise nod of the head, which aggravated Mary
quite as much as the knowing tone with which he exclaimed, "I told you
so! I told you that when the torch once set you to blazing you'd be the
biggest beacon fire in the bunch!"

That night Mary dreamed of that basement room with the mould on the
walls and the water seeping in from the adjoining cellar, and of the
girl dying of consumption on the musty mattress. And all the forty
sufferers who had sickened and died from the unsanitary conditions of
the tenement trooped through her dream, and held out their feverish thin