them unusually affectionate and responsive.

Happy at having been able to give them pleasure, and full of
tender, womanly thoughts, she crossed the square to another small
hospital; she was absorbed in pitiful, loving humanity, had
forgotten altogether that the world counted her as a heretic, and
wholly unprepared for what awaited her, she was shown into the
visitors' room and asked to give her name. Not only was Raeburn
too notorious a name to pass muster, but the head of the hospital
knew Erica by sight, and had often met her out of doors with her
father. She was a stiff, narrow-minded, uncompromising sort of
person, and, in her own words was "determined to have no fellowship
with the works of darkness." How she could consider bright-faced
Erica, with her loving thought for others and her free gift, a
"work of darkness," it is hard to understand. She was not at all
disposed, however, to be under any sort of obligation to an
atheist, and the result of it was that after a three minutes'
interview, Erica found herself once more in the square, with her
flowers still in her hand, "declined WITHOUT thanks."

No one ever quite knew what the superintendent had said to her, but
apparently the rebuff had been very hard to bear. Not content with
declining any fellowship with the poor little "work of darkness,"
she had gone on in accordance with the letter of the text to
reprove her; and Erica left the house with burning cheeks, and with
a tumult of angry feeling stirred up in her heart. She was far too
angry to know or care what she was doing; she walked down the quiet
square in the very opposite direction to "Persecution Alley," and
might have walked on for an indefinite time had not some one
stopped her.