CHAPTER XIX.
A MESSENGER OF GOOD TIDINGS.
There stands a large tenement-house on East Fourteenth street, five stories in height, and with several entrances. Scores of barefooted and scantily attired children play in the halls or on the sidewalk in front, and the great building is a human hive, holding scores of families. Some of them, unaccustomed to live better, are tolerably content with their squalid and contracted accommodations; but a few, reduced by gradual steps from respectability and comfort, find their positions very hard to bear.
On the third floor three small rooms were occupied by Mr. and Mrs. Robert Morgan, and their two children. She was the daughter of Mrs. Graham, and had been reared in affluence. How she had incurred her father's displeasure has already been told. He had been taken sick some months before, his little stock of money had melted away, and now he was unable even to pay the small expenses of life in a tenement-house.
Just before Frank made his appearance there was sadness in the little household.
"How much money is there left, Ellen?" asked Robert Morgan.
"Seventy-five cents," she answered, in a tone which she tried to make cheerful.
"And our week's rent will become due to-morrow."
"I may hear from mother," suggested Mrs. Morgan.