ng her protection now
any more than it did when she was alive." _No slops must be emptied
here_: and as Michael read the ascetic command above the tap on the
stairs he wondered for a moment if he were, after all, a sentimentalist.

Mrs. Cleghorne was very voluble when he reached Leppard Street.

"A nice set-out and no mistake!" she declared. "Half of the neighborhood
have been peeping over my area railings as if the murder had been done
in here. Mr. Cleghorne's quite hoarse with hollering out to them to keep
off. And it never rains but what it pours. There's a poor woman gone and
died here now. However, a funeral's a little more lively than the police
nosing round, though her not having a blessed halfpenny and owing me
three weeks on the rent it certainly won't be anything better than a
pauper's funeral."

"What woman?" Michael asked.

"Oh, a invalid dressmaker which I've been very good to--a Mrs. Smith."

"Dead?" he echoed.

"Yes, dead, and laid out, and got a clergyman sitting with her body.
What clergyman? Roman Catholic, I _should_ say. It quite worried Mr.
Cleghorne. He said it gave him the rats to have a priest hanging around
so close at hand. You see, being asthmatic, he's read a lot about these
Roman Catholics, and he doesn't hold with them. They're that underhand,
he says, it makes him nervous."

"Can I see this priest?" Michael asked.

"Well, it's hardly the room you're accustomed to. I've really looked at
her more as a charity than an actual lodger. In fact, my poor old mother
has gone on at me something cruel for being so good to her."

"I think I should like to see this priest," Michael persisted.

Mrs. Cleghorne was with difficulty persuaded to show him the way, and
she was evidently a little suspicious of the motive of his visit. They
descended into the gloom of the basement, and the landlady pointed out
to him the room that was down three steps and up another. She excused
herself from coming too. The priest, a monkey-faced Irishman, was
sitting on the pale blue chest, and as Michael entered, he did not look
up from his Office.

"Is that you, Sister?" he asked. Then he perceived Michael and waited
for him to explain his business.

"I wanted to ask about this poor woman."

Mrs. Smith lay under a sheet with candles winking at her head. Nothing
was visible except her face still faintly rouged in the daylight.

"I was interested in her," Michael exclaimed.

"Indeed!" said the priest dryly. "