So, as the work drew near its completion he watched it more and more carefully, matching tints in rooms, and always bringing down some new idea, or finding some particular bit of furniture that would some day fit into a certain niche. In that way he cheated the lonely ache in his heart, and made believe he was happy.
And another winter drew its white mantle about its shoulders and prepared to face the blast.
It bade fair to be a bitter winter for the poor, for everything was high, and unskilled labor was poorly paid. Sickness and death were abroad, and lurked in the milk supply, the food supply, the unsanitary tenements about the alley; which, because it had not been so bad as some other districts had been left uncondemned. Yet it was bad enough, and Michael's hands were full to keep his people alive, and try to keep some of them from sinning. For always where there is misery, there is the more sinning.
Old Sal sat on her doorstep shivering with her tattered shawl about her shoulders, or when it grew too cold peered from her little muslin curtained window behind the geranium, to see the dirty white hearse with its pink-winged angel atop, pass slowly in and out with some little fragment of humanity; and knew that one day her turn would come to leave it all and go--! Then she turned back to her little room which had become the only heaven she knew, and solaced herself with the contents of a black bottle!