the bell. The latter nodded dubiously for a
moment, before she disappeared down the dark and narrow hall. Imrie
noticed that she limped as she walked, and that her underskirt showed on
one side. From somewhere below a nauseous odour of stale cooking drifted
up. It was reminiscent to him of schoolday cabbage and boiled things. He
watched Judith in the huge mirror which hung to one side. It was
cracked rather badly, and one of the corners of its finger-marked black
frame had separated.

Presently a stout, red-faced woman with untidy hair, appeared from the
passageway where the young girl had disappeared. She was using her apron
to wipe alternately her hands and the perspiration which exuded
copiously from her forehead. One of her eyes was slightly crossed,
giving her a curious aspect, half comic, half malevolent.

"I would like to see Mr. Good, if I may," repeated Judith pleasantly, as
she approached.

The stout woman raised her hand with a gesture of regret. "Pshaw
now--you're too late."

"Too late?" echoed Judith, her voice trembling.

"Yiss, it's too bad, surely," said the woman calmly. "He died goin' on
two days, it is."

For an instant Imrie thought that Judith was going to faint. All the
colour left her face. As she stood there, trembling and swallowing hard,
her pallor showing green in the dim and flickering gas-light, he thought
he had never seen anything more pitiful.

"Was you a friend of his'n?" asked the stout woman, apparently rather
surprised at the reception of her intelligence.

"Yes," whispered Judith, drawing the words in through compressed lips,
"I was a--friend." Then she removed her hand from the newel post, which
had steadied her, and drew herself erect with what seemed like a
physical effort.

"I wonder if it would be possible to ... has his room--been changed?
Could I ... see it?"

"Bless yer heart, child, that ye may," said the landlady
sympathetically, as if she had solved the problem. Imrie hated her
violently for her solution. "Jist step this way," she added soothingly.

She led the way up interminable flights of stairs, which creaked and
groaned no matter how lightly they tried to walk. Finally they stopped
climbing, and proceeded down a narrow hall, lighted, after a fashion, by
a single gas lamp. Every now and then a draft from somewhere set it
quivering gustily.

Judith was walking as if in a dream. Imrie felt certain that she saw
none of the sights which he saw, nor heard t