r ear. "That is what mamma used to say
so often," she thought. "That is the way _she_ lived. But can I keep it
up for a whole lifetime, clear to the end?"

It was the years that lay behind her which helped her to an answer. The
years, which, could they have been marked like Edryn's would have been
bejewelled with the tokens of little duties faithfully performed. No
pearls showed white like his to mark them, no diamond gleamed where
Sorrow's tear had fallen, no amethyst glowed in purple splendor to mark
her patient meeting with Defeat, yet she had earned them as truly as he,
and in the earning had fitted herself for this fuller fealty.

The sky had lightened until the far shore of the river was dimly visible
when she stood up and held out her hands towards it in a mute gesture of
surrender. Like Edryn she had heard the supreme call, and like him she
answered it:

"Oh, heart, and hand of mine, keep tryst!
Keep tryst or die!"

She was still in the same exalted mood when she sat down next day to
answer the angry letter which had started her on her search after "local
color." All her indignation of the previous day came back, and she
pictured the foul conditions of the basement room as realistically as a
photographer could have done, ending with the underscored statement:

"The man you are defending is living luxuriously on the rents he
collects from this death-trap and others like it, and yet refuses
through his agent to drive one nail in it to make it more fit to live
in. A man who gives out as alms, with one hand, what he wrings with the
other as blood-money from the victims of his miserly greed, deserves to
have a trumpet sounded before him as the hypocrites do, and we shall
continue to sound it until public sentiment compels him to be as humane
as his pretensions."

When Mrs. Blythe came back and found this fiery response on her desk
awaiting her signature, she smiled at first, then recognized gratefully
that this burst of indignation meant that a new ally had been born to
the cause. But she had to explain tactfully to Mary that while her
answer was a just one, it was not wise to anger the man still farther by
sending it.

"I shall have to ask you to rewrite that last page," she said
regretfully. "Send your description of Diamond Row, just as it is, and
the agent's refusal to do anything to better it, but leave out the
personal tirade that follows. It may relieve your feelings but it will