POVERTY, when the bride of need, is in truth a skeleton in ragged raiment. Those folk who prate of the beauties of indigence and of the divine unselfishness of so saintly a state should test the superstition with some leaning towards truth. God help those who are born both proud and poor. God help those who have fallen from the car of opulence into the slough of hunger and of need.

Joan and Gabriel had discovered the many curses of that cultured poverty which is the most piteous product of a diseased civilization. They found the old quip true, that greed, not God, rules the hearts of the many. Penury had encompassed them. Children of an ungenerous shame, they braved the hundred ignominies that poverty creates. Economy was with them, as with thousands of their fellows, a juggling with coins, a plotting with pence, a combat with trifles. Their very existence was a contorted and twisted struggle to escape the coils of annihilation. They had become as drift-wood on the billows of the great city. Alone in the vast solitudes of that human sea, they struggled for life, unknown, abandoned to their own fate, acknowledged of none.

It was such a trial as sours the soul and fills the heart with malice towards those careless of the miseries of their fellows. Like twin shoots cut from a green and luxuriant tree, they had been thrust into sand and left to suck sustenance from brine. They were together, and their love sustained them. It strengthened the man’s heart like wine, touched him with a lustre of heroism, chastened his whole soul.

Gabriel began to comprehend in those troublous days the strange, rich beauty of a woman’s love. Joan’s tenderness, her transcendent courage, kept him mellowed against the gall of care. She was as sunshine and the perfume of roses amid rotting ruins, a shaft of joy gleaming amid gloom. Self seemed never with her. There was never a frown upon her face, an unworthy word upon her lips. She moved through the sordid realism of life unconsciously divine, spontaneously beautiful.

Though hope still trimmed her lamp, the hand of tragedy beckoned through the hangings of the future. Spring had spread her nets of gold and sapphire in the woods; tree called unto tree under the wakening moon; the sap of youth stirred in the earth’s red heart. In the great city the sky alone shone clear and generous, hanging like a blue pall above the pit of labor and disease.

With Joan and Gabriel their store of gold had dwindled like sand in an upturned hour-glass. No harvest had fallen to their lot; no cup had brimmed with the coming of the year. Effort had brought no echo of hope, and the man’s pen seemed to have labored through the nights for naught. Many a package had gone out from the little room; none had returned with the kiss of peace.

It was a spring evening, clear and bright. A swift sunset had brandished the crimson banners of romance above the gray and grinding tide of toil. A film of green had spread over the few pools of nature in the living desert. The restless fires of barter were startling the thin gloom. A last quaver of joy seemed to fall from the ensanguined clouds.

From the door of a pawnshop in a hurrying highway a man stepped out with his hat drawn down over his brows. He glanced half furtively hither and thither, as one new to the ignominies of defeat. A girl in a green cloak, with red roses in her hat, came to him gray-eyed from the dusk of the streets. The man colored as she drew near, and held out a hand with a scanty store of gold glistening in its palm.

“All this?” she asked him, with an eager increase of color.

“Three pounds.”

“Riches.”

He smiled, sadly enough, as she took a faded purse and engulfed the gold.

“It was Judith’s gift to me,” he said, “a marriage present. Poor little Judith, if she but knew its fate! To what ends love falls.”

“I should have loved your sister.”

“Ah, she is soul of your soul, little wife.”

They passed on together into a more populous highway, where the flood of life ran strong and eager. White faces flickered by them, gay, heavy, or morose. The tide of toil gushed past on every hand, bearing the galleys of misery or greed. The painted moths of passion fluttered from darkened byways to jig and glitter in the glow of the many lamps. Opulence rolled on in sable and white. From............