She pondered, with flushed face.

“I never had it put to me like that,” she said, presently.  “I never could have known what you meant if I hadn’t seen Mr. Bentley.”

Here was a return flash, for him.  Thus, teaching he taught.  From this germ he was to evolve for himself the sublime truth that the world grown better, not through automatic, soul-saving machinery, but by Personality.

On another occasion she inquired about “original sin;”—­a phrase which had stuck in her memory since the stormings of the Madison preacher.  Here was a demand to try his mettle.

“It means,” he replied after a moment, “that we are all apt to follow the selfish, animal instincts of our matures, to get all we can for ourselves without thinking of others, to seek animal pleasures.  And we always suffer for it.”

“Sure,” she agreed.  “That’s what happened to me.”

“And unless we see and know some one like Mr. Bentley,” he went on, choosing his words, “or discover for ourselves what Christ was, and what he tried to tell us, we go on ’suffering, because we don’t see any way out.  We suffer because we feel that we are useless, that other persons are doing our work.”

“That’s what hell is!” She was very keen.  “Hell’s here,” she repeated.

“Hell may begin here, and so may heaven,” he answered.

“Why, he’s in heaven now!” she exclaimed, “it’s funny I never thought of it before.”  Of course she referred to Mr. Bentley.

Thus; by no accountable process of reasoning, he stumbled into the path which was to lead him to one of the widest and brightest of his vistas, the secret of eternity hidden in the Parable of the Talents!  But it will not do to anticipate this matter . . . .

The divine in this woman of the streets regenerated by the divine in her fellow-creatures, was gasping like a new-born babe for breath.  And with what anxiety they watched her!  She grew strong again, went with Sally Drover and the other girls on Sunday excursions to the country, applied herself to her embroidery with restless zeal for days, only to have it drop from her nerveless fingers.  But her thoughts were uncontrollable, she was drawn continually to the edge of that precipice which hung over the waters whence they had dragged her, never knowing when the vertigo would seize her.  And once Sally Drover, on the alert for just such an occurrence, pursued her down Dalton Street and forced her back . . .

Justice to Miss Drover cannot be done in these pages.  It was she who bore the brunt of the fierce resentment of the reincarnated fiends when the other women shrank back in fear, and said nothing to Mr. Bentley or Hodder until the incident was past.  It was terrible indeed to behold this woman revert—­almost in the twinkling of an eye—­to a vicious wretch crazed for drink, to feel that the struggle had to be fought all over again.  Unable to awe Sally Drover’s spirit, she would grow piteous.