Cathedral where the service for the saint whose feast day was being
celebrated was now in full and solemn progress.

For one instant, on the first step of the great porch, Sergius Thord
and his companion, Johan Zegota, met,--but making a rapid sign to each
other with the left hand, they as quickly separated,--Zegota to enter
the Cathedral, Thord to walk rapidly down one of the narrowest and most
unfrequented streets to the lower precincts of the city.

The afternoon grew darker, and the weather more depressing, and by the
time evening closed in, the rain was pouring persistently. The wind had
ceased, and the thunder had long since died away, its force drenched
out by the weight of water in the clouds. The saint's day had ended
badly for all concerned;--many of the children who had taken part in
the procession had been carried home by their parents wet through, all
the pretty white frocks and veils of the little girls having been
completely soaked and spoilt by the unkind elements. A drearier night
had seldom gloomed over this fair city of the southern sea, and down in
the quarters of the poor, where men and women dwelt all huddled
miserably in overcrowded tenements, and sin and starvation kept hideous
company together, the streets presented as dark and forbidding an
aspect as the heavy skies blackly brooding above. Here and there a gas-
lamp flared its light upon the drawn little face of some child
crouching asleep in a doorway, or on the pinched and painted features
of some wretched outcast wending her way to the den she called 'home.'
The loud brutal laughter of drunken men was mingled with the wailing of
half-starved and fretful infants, and the mean, squalid houses swarmed
with the living spawn of every vice and lust in the calendar of crime.
Deep in the heart of the so-called civilized, beautiful and luxurious
city, this 'quarter of the poor,' the cancer of the social body,