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“For without the name,” said he, “what good would the business be to ye? Who could believe that the likes of a Jacob Morowsky would know the truth about the blessed saints? And you’re not to forget what I’ve taught you. Arrows for Saint Sebastian, flames and a gridiron for Saint Lawrence, a big book for Saint Luke (he was a scholard, you know), and the rosary for Saint Dominick. There’s not the call there used to be for Saint Aloysius, but when you’re doing him, don’t forget to put a skull in his hand. You have your ‘Lives of the Saints,’ haven’t you?”

“I have, dear master,” answered Jacob.

“Then keep on studyin’ it. And ye’ll do what ye can for old Biddy Moriarty, that’s took care of me ever since me poor wife died.”

“She shall be of my household,” answered Jacob. And so Esther succeeded to the old man’s name and the old woman’s care.

Jacob Morowsky left his old quarters, and John Nolan took up his residence in the front room of the second floor of a house that had been the residence of an English official when New York was a Colony of the Crown. The house had endured many vicissitudes and degradations. It was, when Esther knew it, a tenement unpopular with the authorities because it could not quite condescend to the laws of the Tenement House Commission; and not too popular with its landlord because its rooms, in proportion to its ground area, were extravagantly few. Its spacious halls and staircase, its high ceilings and wide chimneys were all so many waste spaces according to modern tenement architecture.

Esther and her father slept in the drawing-room behind a red curtain, Esther in her babyhood’s crib which, as she had written to the Stork, she had quite outgrown. But no one seemed to notice that. No one, in fact, noticed her very much. She was a good little girl. She was never late or troublesome at school. Every Friday afternoon she brought home a blue ticket, testifying that her application, her deportment, and her progress were satisfactory. From time to time, as she reached new altitudes in the course of study, the teacher’s name on these tickets varied. But the tickets were the only link between Esther’s two lives of home and school. No reproachful teacher, no truant officer threatening arrest and the Juvenile Court, ever darkened her horizon. No outraged Principal ever summoned her father to an uncomfortable quarter of an hour. She was, as successive teachers noted with amazement, that rara avis in the human family, a normal child. Even her clear dark eyes and her dainty little features were as her ancestry decreed that they should be. And the clear pallor of her skin–which Mrs. Moriarty tried to combat by dressing her much in red–was the normal accompaniment to the fine soft blackness of her hair.

She adored her father. His society was her sunshine, and since he had become John Nolan, Esther’s days had been very cloudy. He was always away from home. There was only one little patch of the morning of Saturday, the Sabbath, which Esther could call her own, and even that was broken into by the service at the Synagogue, when he sat upon one side of the aisle, magnificent in black broadcloth and silk hat, and she sat upon the other side among the maids and matrons. In the afternoon he was at work again. She was in my Lady’s drawing-room, or marketing with Mrs. Moriarty.

“You’re to bide by yourself or along with me,” Mrs. Moriarty had often admonished her. “You’re to bide by yourself till your auntie comes.”

And always to Esther’s eager question, “When is she coming?” Mrs. Moriarty’s cryptic answer had been, “God knows.”

But when she understood that the gloom of the drawing-room had forced Esther into the writing of unsuspected letters, she deemed it wise to go further in enlightenment.