Kate Ransom had attempted no close analysis of her absorbing interest in Gordon’s work. The change in her life from weariness to thrilling interest had been its own justification. Wealth had robbed her of the mystery and charm of accident. The future was fixed; there could be no unknown. The men she had met in society were mere fops, or expert butlers who wrote books on etiquette. Life was a problem for them of what the tailors could do.

She had been isolated from humanity. Now she felt the red blood tingling to her finger tips. Her days were full of sweet surprises or sudden revelations of drama and tragedy, and her woman’s soul responded with eager interest.

She had never loved. Such a woman could not love a tailor’s dummy. Her nature was warm, rich and passionate, and she was consumed with longing for the moment of bliss when her whole being would so burn with sacrificial fire for her beloved that she could walk with him naked in winter snows, unconscious of cold.

Dress, the great mania of the empty minded, she had outgrown. She knew instinctively the colour and the style most becoming to her beauty, and she used these with the ease and assurance of an expert. She was proud of her beautiful face and figure and held them as divine gifts, the surest tokens of the fulfilment of her desires.

Her heart, rich in the ripened treasures of unspent motherhood, brooded in tenderness over her new work—the tortures of half-starved mothers, their doomed babes, their idle fathers, and the misery of the poor and the fallen. This yearning to help she knew to be the cry within her own soul for peace. How to express this fullness of life Gordon was teaching her. Slowly and unconsciously she was clothing this powerful, athletic man with every attribute of her ideal. His steel-gray eyes seemed to pierce her very soul and say, “I understand you; come with me.” His eloquence and emotional thinking were more and more to her the voice of a prophet seer. His face, that flashed and trembled, smiled and clouded with fires of smouldering passion, held her as in a spell. She knew this power was slowly tightening about her heart, yet she rejoiced in its very pain. When she greeted him, and he unconsciously held her soft hand in his big blue-veined grasp, a sense of restful joy came she knew not whence nor why.

Her enthusiasm in his work, her faith and cheering flattery were drawing him with resistless magnetism.

As the summer advanced the heat became so terrific and the suffering in the city so great that Gordon determined to stay at his post and take his vacation in the fall. Mrs. Ransom fussed and fumed over Kate’s determination to stay, but there was no help for it.

July broke the record of forty years for heat. Scores were prostrated daily and dead horses blocked traffic at almost every hour. A drought threatened the water-supply, and night brought no relief to the millions who sweltered in the tenements.

The babies began to die by thousands—more than two thousand a week on Manhattan. Island alone. The city’s wagons raked the little black coffins up and dumped them into the Potters’ Field, one on top of the other, like so many dead flies. Down every tenement-walled street the white ribbons fluttered their tragic story from cellar to attic. At night tired mothers walked the pavements, hot and radiating heat, till the sun rose again, carrying their sick babies, or crowded the housetops, fanning them as they lay on their pallets, pale and still, fighting with Death the grim, silent battle.

Kate Ransom finally gave her entire time to these children. She fitted up a hotel in the mountains of Pennsylvania and kept it full. She chartered a steamer and took a thousand of them for a day up the Hudson as an experiment, and asked Gordon to go with them. They would have music, and a dinner spread under the trees of the park which stretched back from the water’s edge into the towering hills.

He met them at the ferry slip from which the steamer sailed. Kate was already there, and the throng filled every inch of the floor space. She was moving about among them, while they gazed at her in admiration no words in their vocabulary could express. Her face was flushed with excitement, and her violet eyes, wide open, were sparkling with pleasure.

The man’s eyes lingered on the scene, feeling that, for all her magnificently human body, no angel ever made a fairer vision.

He was struck with the silence of these children. As he looked closer it was only too plain they were not children. They were only little wizen-faced men and women, who had never learned to laugh or smile or play; little pinched faces with weak eyes that had never seen God’s green fields; little dirty ears that had been bruised with a thousand beastly noises, but had never heard the murmur of beautiful waters in the depths of a forest. His heart went out to them in a great yearning pity as he recalled his own enchanted childhood.

His voice was soft with tears as he greeted Kate.

“A more pathetic sight than this crowd of silent children old earth never saw. But the shining figure in the centre lights the shadows with a touch of divine beauty.”

“It does break one’s heart to see such children, doesn’t it?” she answered, looking at them tenderly and ignoring his pointed tribute to her beauty.

“Are we all ready?” Gordon cried.

“If you are. Is Mrs. Gordon not coming?”

“No; I couldn’t persuade her. She took our chicks to the seashore.”

As the boat moved swiftly up the great river in the fresh morning air and the breeze blowing down its channel strengthened, they sat together on the after deck and watched the dead souls of the little ones stir with life under the kiss of the wind and the caress of the music.

In the park they spread out in the whispering stillness of the woods. Nature breathed the sweet breath of her life into their hearts again and they began to twist their queer little faces and try to laugh. They called to one another and listened with mute wonder at the echo among the rock-ribbed hills. Gordon watched curiously in their faces the flash of the inherited memory of forest habits, choked and stunted and dormant in all city folks, and yet alive as long as the human heart beats. Within two hours they had grown noisy with play after a timid, clumsy fashion.

“Give them a week and they would learn to laugh!” Kate exclaimed.

But the man was now more interested in watching the woman than the children, as he saw her satin skin flush with pleasure and the creamy lace on her full bosom rise a............