“Why,” he exclaimed, looking around him, “you have been busy, haven’t you?”

“I’ve been up since six,” she told him proudly.  The flat had been dismantled of its meagre furniture, the rug was rolled up and tied, and a trunk strapped with rope was in the middle of the floor.  Her next remark brought home to him the full responsibility of his situation.  She led him to the window, and pointed to a spot among the drenched weeds and rubbish in the yard next door.  “Do you see that bottle?  That’s the first thing I did—­flung it out there.  It didn’t break,” she added significantly, “and there are three drinks in it yet.”

Once more he confined his approval to his glance.

“Now you must come and have some breakfast,” he said briskly.  “If I had thought about it I should have waited to have it with you.”

“I’m not hungry.”  In the light of his new knowledge, he connected her sudden dejection with the sight of the bottle.

“But you must eat.  You’re exhausted from all this work.  And a cup of coffee will make all the difference in the world.”

She yielded, pinning on her hat.  And he led her, holding the umbrella over her, to a restaurant in Tower Street, where a man in a white cap and apron was baking cakes behind a plate-glass window.  She drank the coffee, but in her excitement left the rest of the breakfast almost untasted.

“Say,” she asked him once, “why are you doing this?”

“I don’t know,” he answered, “except that it gives me pleasure.”

“Pleasure?”

“Yes.  It makes me feel as if I were of some use.”

She considered this.

“Well,” she observed, reviled by the coffee, “you’re the queerest minister I ever saw.”

When they had reached the pavement she asked him where they were going.

“To see a friend of mine, and a friend of yours,” he told her.  “He does net live far from here.”

She was silent again, acquiescing.  The rain had stopped, the sun was peeping out furtively through the clouds, the early loiterers in Dalton Street stared at them curiously.  But Hodder was thinking of that house whither they were bound with a new gratitude, a new wonder that it should exist.  Thus they came to the sheltered vestibule with its glistening white paint, its polished name plate and doorknob.  The grinning, hospitable darky appeared in answer to the rector’s ring.

“Good morning, Sam,” he said; “is Mr. Bentley in?”

Sam ushered them ceremoniously into the library, and gate Marcy gazed about her with awe, as at something absolutely foreign to her experience:  the New Barrington Hotel, the latest pride of the city, recently erected at the corner of Tower and Jefferson and furnished in the French style, she might partially have understood.  Had she been marvellously and suddenly transported and established there, existence might still have evinced a certain continuity.  But this house! . .