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■ In each life there is a ruling passion. In Torchy's it was a hopeless love, in Ned's it was fear, in Rose's a burning desire for independence. But only the Guiding Light of Five Points could bring them all to happiness
LATE on a spring afternoon, when the thin sunlight slanted down over the grime-encrusted walls of Five Points, Dr. Ruthledge liked to rest for a while in his study. He didn't sleep. He simply sat there, arms extended along the arms of his old-fashioned easy chair, head pillowed against its worn leather cushions, thinking, struggling with the great problems of people, of existence, of the soul.
One thing Dr. Ruthledge believed, as he believed in the existence of God:
There is a destiny that makes us brothers,
None goes his way alone.
All that we send into the lives of others
Conies back into our own.
But people would not see the truth of those four lines. To their own unhappiness, they fought against seeing it.
There was Rose Kransky, for instance. It was hard to believe that she had learned anything from her tragic experience with Charles Cunningham. Still she went her way, shunning responsibility, struggling against all the ties that held her to others. Now that Ellis Smith, her husband — if he really was her husband— had left the city, she was living with her mother and brother in Five Points; but she had placed her infant son in a nursery, ignoring her mother's heart-broken pleas
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to keep it at home. She seemed completely indifferent to the baby; to her it represented only a burden from which she must free herself.
From Rose, Dr. Ruthledge's thoughts turned with a pang to Ned Holden and his own daughter, Mary Ruthledge. Once — and that not so long ago — his dearest wish had been that these two might be married. But now he was convinced that marriage between them would be a mistake, even a sin. And there was nothing he could do to keep them apart. Torchy, Ned's wife, was his last hope, and now she was gone.
"I know Ned never loved me," Torchy told him the day before she left for San Francisco. "He liked me, he was grateful. But he kept on loving Mary. So I'll just go away. I won't divorce him, and I've told him I wouldn't. But any time he wants to divorce me, he can."
Since then, Ned had moved to a furnished room in Five Points, leaving the apartment he and Torchy had occupied in a better part of the city. Mary, against her father's wishes, saw a great deal of him; but between Ned and the man who had been almost a foster-father to him an estrangement had grown up.
Dr. Ruthledge tried never to judge his fellow-man, but even his love for Ned could not blind him to his faults. He steadfastly refused to see his mother, the woman who
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