“And all you’ve got to offer, then, to this mass of wretchedness, poverty, ignorance, at close quarters with hunger and disease, is to grin and bear it, in hope of a reward somewhere else!”

“I think you don’t quite—­”

The doctor looked up and saw a look of pain on the priest’s face.

“Oh,” she hastened to say, almost as impetuously as she had spoken before, “I don’t mean you—­I don’t mean you.  I know what you do.  Pardon me for speaking so.  I get so discouraged sometimes.”  They stood still a moment, looking up and down the hot, crowded, odorful street they were in, with its flaunting rags of poverty and inefficiency.  “I see so little result of what I can do, and there is so little help.”

“I know,” said the father, as they moved along.  “I don’t see how you can bear it alone.”

This touched a sore spot, and aroused Ruth Leigh’s combativeness.  It seemed to her to approach the verge of cant again.  But she knew the father’s absolute sincerity; she felt she had already said too much; and she only murmured, as if to herself, “If we could only know.”  And then, after a moment, she asked, “Do you, Father Damon, see any sign of anything better here?”

“Yes, today.”  And he spoke very slowly and hesitatingly.  “If you will excuse the personality of it.  When I entered that room today, and saw you with that sick child in your arms, and comprehended what it all meant, I had a great wave of hope, and I knew, just then, that there is coming virtue enough in the world to redeem it.”

Ruth was confounded.  Her heart seemed to stand still, and then the hot blood flowed into her face in a crimson flood.  “Ah,” escaped from her lips, and she walked on more swiftly, not daring to look up.  This from him!  This recognition from the ascetic father!  If one of her dispensary comrades had said it, would she have been so moved?

And afterwards, when she had parted from him, and gone to her little room, the hot flush again came to her neck and brow, and she saw his pale, spiritual face, and could hear the unwonted tenderness of his voice.  Yes, Father Damon had said it of her.

XI

The question has been very much discussed whether the devil, in temperate latitudes, is busier in the summer or in the winter.  When Congress and the various State legislatures are in session, and the stock and grain exchanges are most active, and society is gayest, and the churches and benevolent and reformatory associations are most aggressive—­at this season, which is the cool season, he seems to be most animated and powerful.