Bennie looked up into her eyes.  He seemed, somehow, younger than he had appeared the day before, younger and softer.

“Yes, Miss,” he told her, “it’s always like that, except when it’s worse!”

“And,” Rose-Marie was still asking questions, “do your older sister and brother just drift in, at any time, like that?  And is your father home in the middle of the day?  Don’t any of them work?”

Bennie’s barriers of shyness had been burned away by the warmth of her friendship.  He was in a mood to tell anything.

“Pa, he works sometimes,” he said.  “An’ Ella—­she uster work till she had a fight with her boss last week.  An’ now she says she ain’t gotta work no more ‘cause there’s a feller as will give her everythin’ she wants, if she says th’ word!  An’ Jim—­I ain’t never seen him do nothin’, but he always has a awful lot o’ money.  He must do his workin’ at night—­after I’m asleep!”

Rose-Marie, her mind working rapidly, realized that Bennie had given revelations of which he did not even dream.  Pa—­his condition was what she had supposed it to be—­but Ella was drifting toward danger-shoals that she had never imagined!  Well she knew the conditions under which a girl of Ella’s financial status stops working—­she had heard many such cases discussed, with an amazing frankness, during her short stay at the Settlement House.  And Jim—­Jim with his sleek, patent-leather hair, and his rat-like face—­Jim did his work at night!  Rose-Marie could not suppress the shudder that ran over her.  Quickly she changed the subject to the one bright spot in the Volsky family—­to Lily.

“Your little sister,” she asked Bennie, “has she always been as she is now?  Wasn’t there ever a time when she could hear, or speak, or see?”

Bennie winked back a suspicion of tears before he answered.  Rose-Marie, who found herself almost forgetting the episode of the kitten, liked him better for the tears.  “Yes, Miss,” he told her, “she was born all healthy, Ma says.  But she had a sickness—­when she was a baby.  An’ she ain’t been right since!”

They walked the rest of the way in silence—­a silence of untold depth.  But it was that silent walk, Rose-Marie felt afterward, that cemented the strange affection that had sprung suddenly into flower between them.  As they said good-bye, in front of the brownstone stoop of the Settlement House, there was none of the usual restraint that exists between a child and a grown-up.  And when Rose-Marie asked Bennie, quite as a matter of course, to come to some of their boys’ clubs he assented in a manner as casual as her own.

* * * * *

As she sat down to dinner, that night, Rose-Marie was beaming with happiness and the pride of achievement.  The Superintendent, tired after the day’s work, noticed her radiance with a wearily sympathetic smile—­the Young Doctor, coming in briskly from his round of calls, was aware of her pink cheeks and her sparkling eyes.  All at once he realized that Rose-Marie was a distinct addition to the humdrum life of the place; that she was like a sweet old-fashioned garden set down in the gardenless slums.  He started to say something of the sort before he remembered that a quarrel lay, starkly, between them.