"I am
strong. Oh, thank you, sir,--but I can go alone. It's Dicky--my little
boy. I've never left him so long. I had gone for the medicine and I saw
the church. I used to go to church, sir, before we had our troubles--and
I just went in. It suddenly came over me that God might help me--the
doctor can do nothing."

"I will go with you," he said.

She ceased to resist, as one submitting to the fatality of a superior
will.

The pavements that afternoon, as Hodder and the forlorn woman left the
cool porticoes of St. John's, were like the floor of a stone oven, and
the work horses wore little bonnets over their heads. Keeping to the
shady side, the rector and his companion crossed Tower Street with
its trolley cars and its awninged stores, and came to that depressing
district which had reproached him since the first Sunday of his
ministry when he had traversed it with Eldon Parr. They passed the once
prosperous houses, the corner saloons pandering to two vices, decked
with the flamboyant signs of the breweries. The trees were dying along
the asphalt and in the yards, the iron fences broken here and there, the
copings stained with rust and soot. Hodder's thoughts might have been
likened to the heated air that simmered above the bricks.

They were in Dalton Street! She seemed to have forgotten his presence,
her pace quickened as she turned into a gate and flew up a flight of
dirty stone steps, broken and sagging. Hodder took in, subconsciously,
that the house was a dingy grey, of three stories and a Mansard roof,
with a bay window on the yard side, and a fly-blown sign, "Rooms to
Rent" hanging in one window. Across the street, on a lot that had once
held a similar dignified residence, was the yellow brick building of
the "Albert Hotel," and next door, on the east, a remodelled house of
"apartments" with speaking tubes in the doorway.

The woman led him up another flight of steps to the open door of
the house, through a hallway covered with a ragged carpet, where a
dilapidated walnut hat-rack stood, up the stairs, threading a dark
passage that led into a low-ceiled, stifling room at the very back.
A stout, slatternly person in a wrapper rose as they entered, but the
mother cast herself down beside the lounge where the child was. Hodder
had a moment of fear that she was indeed too late, so still the boy lay,
so pathetically wan was the little face and wasted the form under the
cotton nightgown. The mother passed her hand a