Here and there in the whir of the great city a restful breathing-spot is found, its stretch of grass dotted with moss-covered tombs grouped around a low-pitched church.  At certain hours the sound of bells is heard and the low rhythm of the organ throbbing through the aisles.  Then lines of quietly dressed worshippers stroll along the bordered walks, the children’s hands fast in their mothers’ the arched vestibule-door closing upon them.

Most of these oases, like Trinity, St. Paul’s, and St. Mark’s, differ but little—­the same low-pitched church, the same slender spire, the same stretch of green with its scattered gravestones.  And, outside, the same old demon of hurry, defied and hurled back by a lifted hand armed with the cross.

Of these three breathing-spaces, St. Mark’s is, perhaps, a little greener in the early spring, less dusty in the summer heat, less bare and uninviting in the winter snow.  It is more restful, too, than the others, a place in which to sit and muse—­even to read.  Out from its shade and sunshine run queer side streets, with still queerer houses, rising two stories and an attic, each with a dormer and huge chimney.  Dried-up old aristocrats, these, living on the smallest of pensions, taking toll of notaries public, shyster lawyers, peddlers of steel pens, die-cutters, and dismal real-estate agents in dismal offices boasting a desk, two chairs, and a map.

Stephen’s course lay in the direction of one of these relics of better days—­a wide-eyed house with a pieced-out roof, flattened like an old woman’s wig over a sloping forehead, the eyebrows of eaves shading two blinking windows.  A most respectable old dowager of a building, no doubt, in its time, with the best of Madeira and the choicest of cuts going down two steps into its welcoming basement.  That was before the iron railings were covered with rust and before the three brownstone steps leading to the front door were worn into scoops by heavy shoes; before the polished mahogany doors were replaced by pine and painted a dull, dirty green; before the banisters with their mahogany rail were as full of cavities as a garden fence with half its palings gone; and before—­long before—­ some vulgar Paul Pry had cut a skylight in the hipped roof, through which he could peer, taking note of whatever went on inside the gloomy interior:  each of these several calamities but so much additional testimony to its once grand estate, and every one of them but so many steps in its downward career.

For it had become anything but a happy house—­ this old dowager dwelling of the long ago.  Indeed, it was a very mournful and most depressing house, and so were its tenants.  In the basement was a barber who spent half his time lounging about inside the small door, without his white jacket, waiting for customers.  On the first-floor-back there was a music-teacher whose pupils were so few and far between that only the shortest of lessons at the longest