“Well, I admit it has.  It was nice to see and hear one of our own people, and to feel that we were not separated by an impassable gulf.  To tell the truth, I feel the need of something outside of this old house.  I am beginning to mope and brood.  I fear it will be some time before the way opens back to our former life, and one grows sickly if one lives too long in the shade.  I could work with such a girl as that, for she wouldn’t humiliate me.  See, her card shows that she lives on Fifth Avenue.  If she can work in a mission chapel, I can, especially since she is willing to touch me with her glove off,” she concluded, with a significant smile.

As the evening grew shadowy Mildred took the children out for their walk, and, prompted by considerable curiosity, she led the way to Fifth Avenue, and passed the door on which was inscribed the number printed on Miss Wetheridge’s card.  The mansion was as stately and gave as much evidence of wealth as Mrs. Arnold’s home.  At this moment a handsome carriage drew up to the sidewalk, and Mildred, turning, blushed vividly as she met the eyes of her new acquaintance, who, accompanied by a fashionably-attired young man, had evidently been out to drive.  Mildred felt that she had no right to claim recognition, for a young woman making mission calls in her “district” and the same young lady on Fifth Avenue with her finance, very probably, might be, and often are, two very distinct persons.  The girl was about to pass on with downcast eyes and a hot face, feeling that her curiosity had been well punished.  But she had not taken three steps before a pleasant voice said at her side, “Miss Jocelyn, what have I done that you won’t speak to me?  This is my home, and I hope you will come and see me some time.”

Mildred looked at the speaker searchingly for a moment, and then said, in a low tone and with tearful eyes, “May you never exchange a home like this, Miss Wetheridge, for one like mine.”

“Should it be my fortune to do so—­and why may it not?—­I hope I may accept of my lot with your courage, Miss Jocelyn, and give to my humbler home the same impress of womanly refinement that you have imparted to yours.  Believe me, I respected you and your mother thoroughly the moment I crossed your threshold.”

“I will do whatever you wish me to do,” was her relevant, although seemingly irrelevant, reply.

“That’s a very big promise,” said Miss Wetheridge vivaciously; “we will shake hands to bind the compact,” and her attendant raised his hat as politely as he would to any of his companion’s friends.

Mildred went home with the feeling that the leaden monotony of her life was broken.  The hand of genuine Christian sympathy, not charity or patronage, had been reached across the chasm of her poverty, and by it she justly hoped that she might be led into new relations that would bring light and color into her shadowed experience.