MAGDALEN--IN MODERN TIMES.

"WHEN your mother was alive were you ever out with her after
nightfall in the streets of a great city?"

In those extraordinary terms Mercy Merrick opened the
confidential interview which Grace Roseberry had forced on her.
Grace answered, simply, "I don't understand you."

"I will put it in another way," said the nurse. Its unnatural
hardness and sternness of tone passed away from her voice, and
its native gentleness and sadness returned, as she made that
reply. "You read the newspapers like the rest of the world," she
went on; "have you ever read of your unhappy fellow- creatures
(the starving outcasts of the population) whom Want has driven
into Sin?"

Still wondering, Grace answered that she had read of such things
often, in newspapers and in books.

"Have you heard--when those starving and sinning fellow-creatures
happened to be women--of Refuges established to protect and
reclaim them?"

The wonder in Grace 's mind passed away, and a vague suspicion of
something painful to come took its place. "These are
extraordinary questions," she said, nervously. "What do you
mean?"

"Answer me," the nurse insisted. "Have you heard of the Refuges?