After that the friendless children swept lighter subjects out of sight.  Mr. Van Ness, whose humility in this light rose to saintly heights, had all the statistics of the Bureaux of Charity at his tongue’s end.  He had studied the Dangerous Classes in every obscure corner of the world.  He could give you the status quo of any given tribe in India just as easily as the time-table on the new railway in Egypt.  No wonder that he could tell you in a breath the percentage of orphans, deserted minors, children of vicious parents, in his own State, and the amount per capita required to civilize and Christianize them.  As he talked of this matter his eyes became suffused with tears.  The great Home for these helpless wards of the State he described at length, from its situation on a high table-land of the Alleghanies and the dimensions of the immense buildings down to the employments of the children and the capacity of the laundry—­a perfect Arcadia with all the modern improvements, where Crime was to be transformed wholesale into Virtue.

“Where is this institution?” asked Miss Fleming.  “It is strange I never heard of it.”

“Oh, it is not built as yet:  we have not raised the funds,” Mr. Van Ness replied with a smothered sigh.

The judge patted one foot and looked at him compassionately.  It was a devilishly queer ambition to be the savior of those dirty little wretches in the back alleys.  But if a man had given himself up, body and soul, to such a pursuit, it was hard measure that he must be thwarted in it.

Miss Fleming also bent soft sympathetic eyes on her new friend.  The Home was not built, eh?  Not a brick laid?  She wondered whether that box with the priceless treasures existed in his friend’s cellar or in his brain:  she wondered whether he had not seen those pictures of the old masters in photographs, or whether he had travelled in Japan and the obscure corners of the earth in the flesh or in books.  There was more than the wonted necessity upon her to establish sympathetic relations with this new man:  she had never seen a finer presence:  the beard and brow quite lifted his masculinity into aesthetic regions; she caught glimpses, too, of an unfamiliar mongrel species of intellect with which she would relish Platonic relations.  Yet with this glow upon her she regarded the reformer’s noble face and benignant blond beard doubtfully, thinking how she used to stick pins in brilliant bubbles when she was a child, and nothing would be left but a patch of dirty water.

“Jane is out on the river, as usual?” she asked presently.

“Yes,” said her father:  “Mr. Neckart is with her.  Neither of them will ever stay under a roof if they can help it.  They ought to have a dash of Indian blood in their veins to account for such vagabondizing.”

“Is Bruce Neckart here?” with a change in her tone which made the captain look up at her involuntarily.

“Yes.”