As the elevated train slowly rounded a curve he looked into the open window of a room where a gloomy huddle of yellow-faced, sunken-cheeked, brown-bearded men bent their heads over busy sewing-machines.

Nearest the window, full before it, was one that touched him--a young man with some hardy spirit of hope still enduring in his starved face, some stubborn refusal to recognise the odds against him.

And fixed to his machine, where his eyes might now and then raise to it from his work, was a spray of lilac--his little spirit flaunting itself gaily even from the cross.

The pathos of it was somehow intensified by the grinding of the wheels that carried him by it.
The train creaked its way around the curve--but the face dreaming happily over the lilac spray in that hopeless room stayed in his mind, coercing him.
As he entered the house, Nancy met him.
"Do go and be host to those men.

It's our day for the Ministers' Meeting," she continued, as he looked puzzled, "and just as they sat down Allan was called out to one of his people who is sick.