valley where it nestled; and Mrs. Breen found, upon the vigorous inquiry which she set on foot, that the operatives were deplorably destitute of culture and drainage.  She at once devoted herself to the establishment of a circulating library and an enlightened system of cess-pools, to such an effect of ingratitude in her beneficiaries that she was quite ready to remand them to their former squalor when her son-in-law returned.  But he found her work all so good that he mediated between her and the inhabitants, and adopted it with a hearty appreciation that went far to console her, and finally popularized it.  In fact, he entered into the spirit of all practical reforms with an energy and intelligence that quite reconciled her to him.  It was rather with Grace than with him that she had fault to find.  She believed that the girl had returned from Europe materialized and corrupted; and she regarded the souvenirs of travel with which the house was filled as so many tokens of moral decay.  It is undeniable that Grace seemed for a time, to have softened to, a certain degree of self-indulgence.  During the brief opera season the first winter after her return, she spent a week in Boston; she often came to the city, and went to the theatres and the exhibitions of pictures.  It was for some time Miss Gleason’s opinion that these escapades were the struggles of a magnanimous nature, unequally mated, to forget itself.  When they met she indulged the habit of regarding Mrs. Libby with eyes of latent pity, till one day she heard something that gave her more relief than she could ever have hoped for.  This was the fact, perfectly ascertained by some summer sojourners in the neighborhood; that Mrs. Libby was turning her professional training to account by treating the sick children among her husband’s operatives.

In the fall Miss Gleason saw her heroine at an exhibition of pictures.  She rushed across the main hall of the Museum to greet her.  “Congratulate you!” she deeply whispered, “on realizing your dream!  Now you are happy, now you can be at peace!”

“Happy?  At peace?”

“In the good work you have taken up.  Oh, nothing, under Gawd, is lost!” she exclaimed, getting ready to run away, and speaking with her face turned over her shoulder towards Mrs. Libby.

“Dream?  Good work?  What do you mean?”

“Those factory children!”

“Oh!” said Mrs. Libby coldly, “that was my husband’s idea.”

“Your husband’s!” cried Miss Gleason, facing about again, and trying to let a whole history of suddenly relieved anxiety speak in her eyes.  “How happy you make me!  Do let me thank you!”

In the effort to shake hands with Mrs. Libby she knocked the catalogue out of her hold, and vanished in the crowd without knowing it.  Some gentleman picked it up, and gave it to her again, with a bow of burlesque devotion.

Mrs. Libby flushed tenderly.  “I might have known it would be you, Walter.  Where did you spring from?”