"Me?" Tom hugged the arm he held. "Not till you turn me out!"
They walked in silence for a block. "Pard," Tom began in a low voice, "I don't know why you've been so good to me. I don't know nuttin', an' I'm a lot o' trouble. Mebbe sometimes you t'ink I don't appreciate all what you've done for me. But I do. When I t'ink about when I tried to steal your coat a year ago, an' den when I t'ink about now—I certainly do appreciate. I'm goin' to work hard—an' I'm goin' to study hard—an' I'm goin' to do what you tell me. If I do, d'you t'ink I'll ever make somebody?"
David pressed the arm closer. "My boy, you're going to make a splendid man!"
Tom looked up; tears were in his eyes. "Pard—I'd die tryin'—for you!" he said.
When they reached the apartment house that held their new home, David sent Tom upstairs and set out for St. Christopher's Mission. His sense of loneliness made his mind dwell upon Mr. Chambers's offer of millions; for earlier in the evening a messenger had brought a note from Helen which gave the substance of her talk with her father. He would not have returned an answer different from hers—yet in this moment he ached for those things which had been refused in his name, and the aching drew him to look upon that for which he had given them up.
He paused across the street from St. Christopher's and gazed at the brilliant windows of the club-house and at the great window in the chapel that glowed in memory of Morton. Then he crossed the street and entered the club-house. A few young men and women were coming down the stairway, and a few struggling late-comers were mounting to the floors above. He stood irresolute, then noticing that farther down the hall the door of the assembly room was open, he cautiously joined the little knot of people who stood about it.
The room was crowded with men and women, all in their best clothes. David quickly gathered from the talk of the officers on the platform, all women, that this was a meeting of the Women's Club, held for the double purpose of installing new officers and entertaining the members' husbands. He had been gazing in but a few minutes when the new president, a shapeless little woman, was sworn into office. The audience demanded a speech, and her homely face glowing with happiness and embarrassment, she responded in a few halting, grammarless phrases. "I hope I can do my duty," she ended, "so good that Dr. Morton, who got us to make this club, won't never be ashamed when he looks down on it."
Her other sentences had been applauded, but this last was received in that deep silence which is applause at its highest; and it came to David afresh that Morton was still the soul of St. Christopher's. All the while that other officers were being installed this closing sentence and its significance persisted in his mind, and so engrossed him that he was startled when the folding chairs began to be rattled shut and stacked in one corner of the room. A little later a piano and a violin started up, and part of the fathers and mothers began stumbling about in a two-step, and part crowded against the walls and made merry over the awkwardness and disasters of the dancers.
David slipped out of the building. Clearer than ever before had come to him a realisation of the responsibility of sacrifice: when one gives, the gift no longer belongs to one—it belongs to those who have builded their lives upon it.
Across the street, he looked back. Only once before had the Morton Memorial window seemed to him more significant, more warm and powerful in its inspiration—and that was on the day of his discharge from prison when it had first flashed upon his vision. Above the glowing window the chapel's short spire, softened by the round-hanging poetry of night, seemed to his imagination to be the uplifted, supplicatory hands of the neighbourhood.... Well, their Morton was safe.