They had gone for perhaps three miles or more from the morgue, traveling for the most part through narrow streets crowded full of small dwelling-houses interspersed by cheap stores and saloons.  The night lowered! the stars were not on duty.  A cold wind from the river swept around corners, reminding him of the dripping yellow hair of the girl in the morgue.  It cut like a knife through Courtland’s heavy overcoat and made him wish he had brought his muffler.  He stuffed his gloved hands into his pockets.  Even in their fur linings they were stiff and cold.  He thought of the girl’s little light serge jacket and shivered visibly as they turned into another street where vacant lots on one side left a wide sweep for the wind and sent it tempesting along freighted with dust and stinging bits of sand.  The clouds were heavy as with snow, only that it was too cold to snow.  One fancied only biting steel could fall from clouds like that on a night so bitter.  And any moment he might have turned back, gone a block to one side, and caught the trolley across to the university, where light and warmth and friends were waiting.  And what was this one little lost girl to him?  A stranger?  No, she was no longer a stranger!  She had become something infinitely precious to the whole universe.  God cared, and that was enough!  He could not be a friend of God unless he cared as God cared!  He was demonstrating facts that he had never apprehended before.

The lights were out in most of the houses that they passed, for it was growing late.  There were not quite so many saloons.  The streets loomed wide ahead, the line of houses dark on the left, and the stretch of vacant lots, with the river beyond on the right.  Across the river a line of dark buildings with occasional blink of lights blended into the dark of the sky, and the wind merciless over all.

On ahead a couple of blocks the light flung out on the pavement and marked another saloon.  Bright doors swung back and forth.  The intermittent throb of a piano and twang of a violin, making merry with the misery of the world; voices brokenly above it all came at intervals, loudly as the way drew nearer.

The saloon doors swung again and four or five dark figures jostled noisily out and came haltingly down the street.  They walked crazily, like ships without a rudder, veering from one side of the walk to the other, shouting and singing uncouth, ribald songs, hoarse laughter interspersed with scattered oaths.

“O!  Jesus Christ!” came distinctly through the quiet night.  The young man felt a distinct pain for the Christ by his side, like the pressing of a thorn into the brow.  He seemed to know the prick himself.  For these were some of those for whom He died!

It occurred to Courtland that he was seeing everything on this walk through the eyes of the Christ.  He remembered Scrooge and his journey with the Ghost of Christmas Past in Dickens’s Christmas Carol.  It was like that.  He was seeing the real soul of everybody!  He was with the architect of the universe, noting where the work had gone wrong from the mighty plans.  He suddenly knew that these creatures coming giddily toward him were planned to mighty things!