he nightly carousal was
beginning.

Hodder retraced his steps, crossed the street diagonally, came to the
dilapidated gate he remembered so well, and looked up through the dusk
at the house. If death had entered it, there was no sign: death must be
a frequent visitor hereabouts. On the doorsteps he saw figures outlined,
slatternly women and men in shirt-sleeves who rose in silence to make
way for him, staring at him curiously. He plunged into the hot darkness
of the hall, groped his way up the stairs and through the passage, and
hesitated. A single gas jet burned low in the stagnant air, and after
a moment he made out, by its dim light, a woman on her knees beside the
couch, mechanically moving the tattered palm-leaf over the motionless
little figure. The child was still alive. He drew a deep breath, and
entered; at the sound of his step Mrs. Garvin suddenly started up.

"Richard!" she cried, and then stood staring at the rector. "Have you
seen my husband, sir? He went away soon after you left."

Hodder, taken by surprise, replied that he had not. Her tone, her
gesture of anxiety he found vaguely disquieting.

"The doctor has been here?" he asked.

"Yes," she answered absently. "I don't know where he can be--Richard. He
didn't even wait to see the doctor. And he thinks so much of Dicky, sir,
he sits here of an evening--"

Hodder sat down beside her, and taking the palm-leaf from her hand,
began himself to fan the child. Something of her misgiving had
communicated itself to him.

"Don't worry," he said. "Remember that you have been through a great
deal, and it is natural that you should be overwrought. Your husband
feels strongly. I don't blame him. And the sight of me this afternoon
upset him. He has gone out to walk."

"Richard is proud," she answered simply. "He used to say he'd rather
die than take charity--and now he's come to it. And it's--that man, sir,
who's got on his brain, and changed him. He wasn't always like this, but
now he can't seem to think of anything else. He wakes up in the night
.... And he used to have such a sweet nature--you wouldn't have known
him... and came home so happy in the evenings in Alder Street, often
with a little fruit, or something he'd bought for us, and romp with
Dicky in the yard, and I'd stand and laugh at them. Even after we'd lost
our money, when he was sick that time, he didn't feel this way. It grew
on him when he couldn't get work, and then he began to cut things o