Page:Lynch Williams--The stolen story and other newspaper stories.djvu/102

 his feet cocked up, while screaming children were being led away to the Gerry Society.

Away up-town, far from the noise of Newspaper Row, far up, nearly to the end of the green park, where the streets are clean and asphalted, and so quiet that horses' feet make a pleasant patter, where there is bright blue sky and sunshine and open, clear spaciousness, with clean-capped nurse-maids wheeling baby-carriages along by the park-wall, where the sparrows twitter—away up there lived a girl that Linton liked to talk to when he was thinking of giving up human nature.

She didn't know much about human nature, but she had a gentle voice and believed in everybody, and some day she was to be a lovely woman. Linton could tell that, and it helped a good deal to know that there were people like this in New York. It helped him to keep his respect for things respectable; it helped him to believe in a good God and fairly good people, and nice, clean sunniness somewhere.

She did not know she was to be a lovely woman nor that she helped anybody. She