ort, red faced creature, who said she had once been
"a wash lady," but who had long given up a profession which required
such constant use of water, and who now, so far as could be seen, used
no liquid in any way except whiskey or beer.

The dingiest room in this house was, perhaps, the little hall-cupboard
at the head of the second flight of rickety stairs. It was small and
dim. Its single window looked out over the tops of wretched little
shingled houses in the bottom below to the backs of some huge
warehouses beyond. The only break in the view of squalor was the blue
sky over the top of the great branching elm shading the white
back-portico of a large house up in the high part of the town several
squares off. In this miserable cupboard, hardly fit to be called a
room, unfurnished except with a bed and a broken chair, lived a
person--a little girl--if one could be said to live who lies in bed all
the time. You could hardly tell her age, for the thin face looked much
older than the little crooked body. There were lines around the mouth
and about the white face which might have been worn by years or only by
suffering. The bed-ridden body was that of a child of ten or twelve.
The arms and long hands looked as the face did--older--and as she lay
in her narrow bed she might have been any moderate age. Her sandy hair
was straight and faded; her dark eyes were large and sad. She was
known to Mrs. O'Meath and the few people who knew her at all as
"Molly." If she had any other name, it was not known. She had no
father or mother, and was supposed by the lodgers to be some relative,
perhaps a niece, of Mrs. O'Meath. She had never known her father. Her
mother she remembered dimly, or thought she did; she was not sure. It
was a dim memory of a great brightness in the shape of a young woman
who was good to her and who seemed very beautiful, and it was all
connected with green trees and grass, and blue skies, and birds flying
about. The only other memory was of a parting, the lady covering her
with kisses, and then of a great loneliness, when she did not come
back, and then of a woman dropping her down the stairs--and ever since
then she had been lying in bed. At least, that was her belief; she was
not sure that the memory was not a dream. At least, all but the bed,
that was real.

Ever since she knew anything she had been lying a prisoner in bed, in
that room or some other. She did not know how she got there. Sh