And yet she was loved!  That sang in her heart with all the pain, with all the despair.  And with it all was a great pity for him, alone, gone into the wilderness, as it would seem to him, to struggle with his fierce temptation.

It had come on darker as she sat there.  The lamps were lighted, and she was reminded of some visits she must make.  She went, mechanically, to her room to prepare for going.  The old jacket, which she took up, did look rather rusty.  She went to the press—­it was not much of a wardrobe —­and put on the one that was reserved for holidays.  And the hat?  Her friends had often joked her about the hat, but now for the first time she seemed to see it as it might appear to others.  As she held it in her hand, and then put it on before the mirror, she smiled a little, faintly, at its appearance.  And then she laid it aside for her better hat.  She never had been so long in dressing before.  And in the evening, too, when it could make no difference!  It might, after all, be a little more cheerful for her forlorn patients.  Perhaps she was not conscious that she was making selections, that she was paying a little more attention to her toilet than usual.  Perhaps it was only the woman who was conscious that she was loved.

It would be difficult to say what emotion was uppermost in the mind of Father Damon as he left the house—­mortification, contempt of himself, or horror.  But there was a sense of escape, of physical escape, and the imperative need of it, that quickened his steps almost into a run.  In the increasing dark, at this hour, in this quarter of the town, there were comparatively few whose observation of him would recall him to himself.  He thought only of escape, and of escape from that quarter of the city that was the witness of his labors and his failure.  For the moment to get away from this was the one necessity, and without reasoning in the matter, only feeling, he was hurrying, stumbling in his haste, northward.  Before he went to the hospital he had been tired, physically weary.  He was scarcely conscious of it now; indeed, his body, his hated body, seemed lighter, and the dominant spirit now awakened to contempt of it had a certain pleasure in testing it, in drawing upon its vitality, to the point of exhaustion if possible.  It should be seen which was master.  His rapid pace presently brought him into one of the great avenues leading to Harlem.  That was the direction he wished to go.  That was where he knew, without making any decision, he must go, to the haven of the house of his order, on the heights beyond Harlem.  A train was just clattering along on the elevated road above him.  He could see the faces at the windows, the black masses crowding the platforms.  It went pounding by as if it were freight from another world.  He was in haste, but haste to escape from himself.  That way, bearing him along with other people, and in the moving world, was to bring him in touch with humanity again, and so with what was most hateful