"What do you want?"
"To help you."
The door opened slowly and John Marvel entered an abode which he said to me afterward he was glad for the first time in his life to be so near-sighted as not to be able to see. A pallet of rags lay in a corner, and on a box crouched, rather than sat, a little girl with a broken crutch by her side, her eyes fastened on the newcomer with a gaze of half bewilderment. It was some time before John Marvel could get anything out of the woman, but he held a key which at last unlocks every heart,—a divine and penetrating sympathy. And presently the woman told him her story. Her husband was a fugitive from justice. She did not say so, but only that he had had to leave the city because the police were after him. His friends had turned against him and against her. She did not know where her husband was, but believed he had left the country, unless, indeed, he were dead. She was waiting to hear from him, and meantime everything which she had had gone, and now, though she did not say so, they were starving. To relieve them was as instinctive with John Marvel as to breathe. The next step was to help them permanently. It was hard to do, because the woman was at bay and was as suspicious as a she-wolf, and the child was as secretive as a young cub. John turned to one, however, who he believed, and with good reason, knew how to do things which were lost to his dull comprehension.
The following day into that den walked Eleanor Leigh, and it was to visit this woman and her child that she was going the morning I met her coming down the steps, when she dropped her violets on the sidewalk. It was a hard task which John Marvel had set her, for as some women may yield to women rather than to men, so there are some who are harder to reach by the former than by the latter, and the lot of Red Talman's wife had separated her from her sex and turned her into a state where she felt that all women were against her. But Eleanor Leigh was equal to the task; having gained admission through the open sesame of John Marvel's name she first applied herself to win the child. Seating herself on the box she began to play with the little girl and to show her the toys she had brought,—toys which the child had never seen before. It was not long before the little thing was in her lap and then the woman had been won. When Eleanor Leigh came away everything had been arranged, and the following night Red Talman's wife and child moved to another quarter of the town, to a clean little room not far from the small school on the way to which I first met the little waif.
"But you don't go into such places by yourself?" I said to her when she had told me their story. "Why, it might cost you your life."
"Oh, no! No one is going to trouble me. I am not afraid."
"Well, it is not safe," I protested. "I wish you wouldn't do it." It was the first time I had ever ventured to assume such an attitude toward her. "I don't care how brave you are, it is not safe."
"Oh! I am not brave at all. In fact, I am an awful coward. I am afraid of mice and all such ferocious beasts—and as to a spider—why, little Miss Muffet was a heroine to me."
"I know," I nodded, watching the play of expression in her eyes with secret delight.
"But I am not afraid of people. They are about the only things I am not afraid of. They appear to me so pitiful in their efforts. Why should one fear them? Besides, I don't think about myself when I am doing anything—only about what I am doing."