latter she was pleased and social, and grew to be interested in what
interested him. As mentioned, Mr. Dinneford was a man of wealth and
leisure, and active in many public charities. He had come to be much
concerned for the neglected and cast-off children of poor and
vicious parents, thousands upon thousands of whom were going to
hopeless ruin, unthought of and uncared for by Church or State, and
their condition often formed the subject of his conversation as well
at home as elsewhere.

Mrs. Dinneford had no sympathy with her husband in this direction. A
dirty, vicious child was an offence to her, not an object of pity,
and she felt more like, spurning it with her foot than touching it
with her hand. But it was not so with Edith; she listened to her
father, and became deeply interested in the poor, suffering,
neglected little ones whose sad condition he could so vividly
portray, for the public duties of charity to which he was giving a
large part of his time made him familiar with much that was sad and
terrible in human suffering and degradation.

One day Edith said to her father,

"I saw a sight this morning that made me sick. It has haunted me
ever since. Oh, it was dreadful!"

"What was it?" asked Mr. Dinneford.

"A sick baby in the arms of a half-drunken woman. It made me shiver
to look at its poor little face, wasted by hunger and sickness and
purple with cold. The woman sat at the street corner begging, and
the people went by, no one seeming to care for the helpless,