The State Department of Charities was a rudimentary affair in those days, just as Queed had said.  Its appropriation was impossibly meager, even with the niggard’s increase just wrung from the legislature.  The whole Department fitted cozily into a single room in the Capitol; it was small as a South American army, this Department, consisting, indeed, of but the two generals.  But the Secretary and the Assistant Secretary worked together like a team of horses.  They had already done wonders, and their hopes were high with still more wonders to perform.  In especial there was the reformatory.  The legislature had adjourned without paying any attention to the reformatory, exactly as it had been meant to do.  But a bill had been introduced, at all events, and the Post had carried a second editorial, expounding and urging the plan; several papers in the smaller cities of the State had followed the Post’s lead; and thus the issue had been fairly launched, with the ground well broken for a successful campaign two years later.

The office of the Department was a ship-shape place, with its two desks, a big one and a little one; the typewriter table; the rows and rows of letter-files on shelves; a sectional bookcase containing Charities reports from other States, with two shelves reserved for authoritative books by such writers as Willoughby, Smathers, and Conant.  Here, doubtless, would some day stand the colossal work of Queed.  At the big desk sat the Rev. Mr. Dayne, a practical idealist of no common sort, a kind-faced man with a crisp brown mustache.  At the typewriter-table sat Sharlee Weyland, writing firm letters to thirty-one county almshouse keepers.  It was hard upon noon.  Sharlee looked tired and sad about the eyes.  She had not been to supper at Mrs. Paynter’s for months, but she went there nearly every afternoon from the office to see Fifi, who had been in bed for four weeks.

The Department door opened, with no premonitory knock, and in walked, of all people, Mr. Queed.

Sharlee came forward very cordially to greet the visitor, and at once presented him to the Secretary.  However Queed dismissed Mr. Dayne very easily, and gazing at Sharlee sharply through his spectacles, said: 

“I should like to speak to you in private a moment.”

“Certainly,” said Sharlee.

“I’ll step into the hall,” said kind-faced Mr. Dayne.

“No, no.  Indeed you mustn’t.  We will.”

Sharlee faced the young man in the sunlit hail with sympathetic expectancy and some curiosity in her eyes.

“There is,” he began without preliminaries, “a girl at the house where I board, who has been confined to her bed with sickness for some weeks.  It appears that she has grown thin and weak, so that they will not permit her to graduate at her school.  This involves a considerable disappointment to her.”

“You are speaking of Fifi,” said Sharlee, gently.

“That is the girl’s name, if it is of any interest to you—­”