asting good," she thought. "It's like the
ice that brings relief for a moment, but is melted and gone the next!
And my salary is all gone, and so is nearly everything that I saved the
month before. There isn't a dollar left to my credit in the savings
bank. What _is_ the use of going on this way, when all one can do
amounts to no more than a drop in the bucket?"

Mary had sat up late the night before, finishing a lot of letters that
Mrs. Blythe was anxious to have mailed as soon as possible. It was
midnight when she covered her typewriter, and the heat and a stray
mosquito which had eluded both Mrs. Crum and the screens, made her
wakeful and restless. That accounted for her physical exhaustion, while
the experiences of the morning were enough to send her spirits to the
lowest ebb.

She told herself over and over, as she lay across the bed and tried to
reason herself into a more cheerful frame of mind, that it was only
natural that she should feel as she did, and that when she was rested
the world would look as bright as usual. On account of her late work the
night before, Mrs. Blythe had given her nothing to do to-day. It was to
see proteges of her own that Mary had gone to the tenements. She might
have passed the morning with a book, down on the bank of the river under
the willows, where there was a cooling breath now and then from the
water. But, haunted by Elsie Whayne's hollow-eyed little face, she could
not go off and enjoy her holiday alone in comfort.

For weeks Elsie had seemed burning up with a slow fever, and it was for
her Mary had spent the last of her salary on alcohol for cooling rubs,
and for ice and for some thin, soft ready-made gowns. Poor little
country-bred Elsie, who had cried over her line of gray clothes because
she could not wash them clean in the scanty amount of water allotted to
each room in the crowded house, cried again over the snowy whiteness of
the new gowns. They were such a joy to her that it was pitiful to hear
her exclamations over them.

And Mary, seeing the wreck that fever had made of the pretty child, who
had come to the tenement abloom with health, wrote down one more black
crime against the man who was responsible for the fever, because he
would not clean up the plague-infested spots on which it fed and grew.

It is bad enough to be ill when one has every luxury in a quiet room to
oneself, where deft-fingered nurses keep noiseless watch to minister to
the slightest need; bu