It was at the mission that Father Damon had first seen the girl.  She had ventured in not long ago at twilight, with her cough and her pale face, in a silk gown and flower-garden of a hat, and crept into one of the confessional boxes, and told him her story.

“Do you think, Father,” said the girl, looking up wistfully, “that I can —­can be forgiven?”

Father Damon looked down sadly, pitifully.  “Yes, my daughter, if you repent.  It is all with our Father.  He never refuses.”

He knelt down, with his cross in his hand, and in a low voice repeated the prayer for the dying.  As the sweet, thrilling voice went on in supplication the girl’s eyes closed again, and a sweet smile played about her mouth; it was the innocent smile of the little girl long ago, when she might have awakened in the morning and heard the singing of birds at her window.

When Father Damon arose she seemed to be sleeping.  They all stood in silence for a moment.

“You will remain?” he asked the doctor.

“Yes,” she said, with the faintest wan smile on her face.  “It is I, you know, who have care of the body.”

At the door he turned and said, quite low, “Peace be to this house!”

VI

Father Damon came dangerously near to being popular.  The austerity of his life and his known self-chastening vigils contributed to this effect.  His severely formal, simple ecclesiastical dress, coarse in material but perfect in its saintly lines, separated him from the world in which he moved so unostentatiously and humbly, and marked him as one who went about doing good.  His life was that of self-absorption and hardship, mortification of the body, denial of the solicitation of the senses, struggling of the spirit for more holiness of purpose—­a life of supplication for the perishing souls about him.  And yet he was so informed with the modern spirit that he was not content, as a zealot formerly might have been, to snatch souls out of the evil that is in the world, but he strove to lessen the evil.  He was a reformer.  It was probably this feature of his activity, and not his spiritual mission, that attracted to him the little group of positivists on the East Side, the demagogues of the labor lodges, the practical workers of the working-girls’ clubs, and the humanitarian agnostics like Dr. Leigh, who were literally giving their lives without the least expectation of reward.  Even the refined ethical-culture groups had no sneer for Father Damon.  The little chapel of St. Anselm was well known.  It was always open.  It was plain, but its plainness was not the barrenness of a non-conformist chapel.  There were two confessionals; a great bronze lamp attached to one of the pillars scarcely dispelled the obscurity, but cast an unnatural light upon the gigantic crucifix that hung from a beam in front of the chancel.  There were half a dozen rows of backless benches in