Rose-Marie, having no answer, turned expectantly toward the door.  If this Jim had passed his sister on the stairs, she couldn’t be very far away.  As if in reply to her supposition, the door swung open again and a tall, dark-eyed girl came into the room.  Rose-Marie saw with her first swift glance that the red upon the girl’s cheeks was too high to be quite natural—­that the scarlet of her lips was over-vivid.  And yet, despite the patently artificial colouring, she realized that the girl was beautiful with a high strung, almost thoroughbred beauty.  She wondered how this beauty had been born of the dim woman who seemed so colourless and the sodden brute who lay snoring in the comer.

Her train of thought was broken, suddenly.  For the young man was speaking.  Rose-Marie disliked, somehow, the very tone of his voice.

“Here’s a girl t’ see you, Ella,” he said.  “She’s from th’ Settlement House—­she says!  Maybe she wants,” sarcastically, “that you should join a Bible Class!”

The girl’s eyes were flashing with a dangerously hard light.  She turned angrily to Rose-Marie.  But before she could say anything, the child, Bennie, had interposed.

“She didn’t come t’ see you” he told his older sister—­“she don’t want t’ see you—­like those other wimmen did.  She come t’ see Lily—­”

He paused and Rose-Marie, who had gathered that social service workers were not welcome visitors, went on breathlessly, from where he left off.

“I am from the Settlement House,” she told Ella, “and I’d like awfully to have you join our classes.  But that wasn’t why I came here.  Bennie told me that he had a dear little sister.  And I came to see her.”

A change swept miraculously over Ella’s cold face.  Rose-Marie could see, all at once, that she and her young brother were strikingly alike—­that Jim was the different one in this family.

“I’ll get Lily,” Ella said simply, and there was a warmth, a tenderness in her dark eyes that had been so hard.  “I didn’t understand,” she added, as she went quickly past Rose-Marie and into the small inner room that Bennie had said his sisters shared.  In a moment she came out leading a small girl by the hand.

“This is Lily!” she said softly.

Even in that dingy place—­perhaps accentuated by the very dinginess of it—­Lily’s blond loveliness struck Rose-Marie with a sense of shock.  The child might have been a flower—­the very flower whose name she bore—­growing upon an ash heap.  Her beauty made the rest of the room fade into dim outlines—­made Jim and Ella and Bennie seem heavy, and somehow overfed.  Even Pa, snoring lustily, became almost a shadow.  Rose-Marie stepped toward the child impulsively, with outflung arms.

“Oh, you dear!” she said shakily, “you dear!”

Nobody spoke.  Only Ella, with gentle hands, pushed her little sister forward.  The child’s great blue eyes looked past Rose-Marie, and a vague smile quivered on her lips.