Walker Farr gave the first policeman—­a fat and sweltering individual—­a piece of gruesome news and in return casually asked the location of Block Ten.

The policeman grudgingly growled the information over his shoulder while waiting for the station to answer the call from his box.

The young man, taking his time, found the place at last, one in an interminable row of tenement-houses, all identical in structure and squalor, bearing the mark of corporation niggardliness in their cheap lumber and stingy accommodations.

The hallway that Farr entered was narrow and stifling—­stale odors of thousands of dead-and-gone boiled dinners mingled there, and a stairway with a greasy handrail invited him.  The key bore a number.  He hunted till he found a room, far up, flight after flight.  Through open doors he saw here and there aged women or doddering old men who were guardians of dirty babes who tumbled about on the bare floors.

“Either too old to run a loom or too young to lug a bobbin,” Farr informed himself; “that’s why they aren’t in the mill.”

Old folks and babes stared at him without showing interest.

No one looked at him when he opened the door in which the key fitted.

He stepped in quickly and closed and locked the door behind him.

It was a little room and pitifully bare, and it was under the roof, and the ceiling slanted across it so sharply that the young man, tall above the average, was compelled to bow his head.

A little girl, a wraith of a child, pale with the pallor of a prisoner, hardly more than a toddler, sat on the floor and stared up at the intruder, frozen, silent, immobile with the sudden, paralyzing terror that grasps the frightened child.  Pathetically poor little playthings were scattered about her:  a doll fashioned from gingham and cotton-waste, makeshift dishes of pasteboard, a doll-carriage made from a broken flower-basket with spools for wheels.  The man who entered saw all with one glance and understood that here in this bare room this child had been compelled to drag out the weary hours alone while the mother had toiled.  Here now the child waited patiently for—­for that water-soaked bundle, with the white, dead face, that lay on the canal bank waiting for the coroner.

And when he realized it and saw this and looked down on that lonely, patient, wistful little creature making the best shift she could with those pitiable playthings, something came up from that man’s breast into his throat.  He had not supposed he had any of it left in his soul—­it was tender, agonizing, heartrending pity.

She still stared at him, terrorized.  Probably she had never seen any face come in at that door except her mother’s.

His pity must have given Walker Farr a hint of how to deal with this frightened child.  He did not speak to her.  He made no move toward her.

He smiled!

But it was not the smile he had given the fat plutocrat in the automobile, nor yet the jocular radiance he had displayed to old Etienne.  It was such a smile as the man had never smiled before—­and he realized it.  He did not want to smile.  He wanted to weep.  But he brought that smile from tender depths in his soul—­depths he had not known of before—­and tears came with the smile.