A few hours before and he would have passed her by with a glance of contemptuous pity.  But now, he seemed to have another sense awakened in him, the sense that feels, that sympathises in the heart with the hearts of others.  It was as though he himself slept there.  It was as though he understood this poor sister, whom the merciful called erring, and the merciless wicked, but of whom the just could only say:  she is what we in her place must have become.  She was an atom of the world of suffering by which his heart was being wrung.  She was one upon whom the Wrong fell crushingly, and she was helpless to resist it.  He was strong, and he had given no thought to those who suffered as this poor outcast suffered.  He had lived his own narrow life, and shared the sin, and assisted Wrong by withholding his full strength from the side of Right.  And upon him was the responsibility for this woman.  He, individually, had kicked her into the streets, and dragged her footsore through the parks, and cast her there to bear testimony against him to every passer-by; he, because he had not fought, whole-souled, with those who seek to shatter the something which, without quite understanding, he knew had kicked and dragged and outcasted this woman sleeping here.  Ned always took his lessons personally.  It was perhaps, a touch in him of the morbidity that seizes so often the wandering Arabs of the western plains.

Suddenly Nellie let go the umbrella, leaving it in his hand.  She bent forward, stooped down.  The strong young face, proud and sad, so pure in its maiden strength, glowing with passionate emotion, was laid softly against that bruised and battered figurehead of shipwrecked womanhood; Nellie had kissed the sleeping harlot on the cheek.

Then, standing erect, she turned to Ned, her lips parted, her face quivering, her eyes flashing, her hand resting gently on the unconscious woman.

“You want to know what Socialism is,” she said, in a low, trembling voice.  “This is Socialism.”  And bending down again she kissed the poor outcast harlot a second time.  The woman never stirred.  Seizing Ned’s arm Nellie drew him away, breaking into a pace that made him respect her prowess as a walker ever after.

Until they reached home neither spoke.  Nellie looked sterner than ever.  Ned was in a whirl of mental excitement.  Perhaps if he had been less natural himself the girl’s passionate declaration of fellowship with all who are wronged and oppressed—­for so he interpreted it by the light of his own thoughts—­might have struck him as a little bit stagey.  Being natural, he took it for what it was, an outburst of genuine feeling.  But if Nellie had really designed it she could not have influenced him more deeply.  Their instincts, much akin, had reached the same idea by different ways.  Her spontaneous expression of feeling had fitted in her mind to the Cause which possessed her as a religious idea, and had capped in him the human yearnings which were leading him to the same goal.  And so, what with his overflowing sympathy for the sleeping outcast, and his swelling love for Nellie, and the chaotic excitement roused in him by all he had seen and heard during the preceding hours, that kiss burnt itself into his imagination and became to him all his life through as a sacred symbol.  From that moment his life was forecast—­a woman tempted him and he ate.