o in their big, cold mansion John Ingerfield and Anne, his wife, sit far
apart, strangers to one another, neither desiring to know the other
nearer.

About his business he never speaks to her, and she never questions him.
To compensate for the slight shrinkage of time he is able to devote to
it, he becomes more strict and exacting; grows a harsher master to his
people, a sterner creditor, a greedier dealer, squeezing the uttermost
out of every one, feverish to grow richer, so that he may spend more upon
the game that day by day he finds more tiresome and uninteresting.

And the piled-up casks upon his wharves increase and multiply; and on the
dirty river his ships and barges lie in ever-lengthening lines; and round
his greasy cauldrons sweating, witch-like creatures swarm in ever-denser
numbers, stirring oil and tallow into gold.

Until one summer, from its nest in the far East, there flutters westward
a foul thing. Hovering over Limehouse suburb, seeing it crowded and
unclean, liking its fetid smell, it settles down upon it.

Typhus is the creature's name. At first it lurks there unnoticed,
battening upon the rich, rank food it finds around it, until, grown too
big to hide longer, it boldly shows its hideous head, and the white face
of Terror runs swiftly through alley and street, crying as it runs,
forces itself into John Ingerfield's counting-house, and tells its tale.
John Ingerfield sits for a while thinking. Then he mounts his horse and
rides home at as hard a pace as the condition of the streets will allow.
In the hall he meets Anne going out, and stops her.

"Don't come too near me," he says quietly. "Typhus fever has broken out
at Limehouse, and they say one can communicate it, even without having it
oneself. You had better leave London for a few weeks. Go down to your
father's: I will come and fetch you when it is all over."

He passes her, giving her a wide berth, and goes upstairs, where he
remains for some minutes in conversation with his valet. Then, coming
down, he remounts and rides off again.

After a little while Anne goes up into his room. His man is kneeling in
the middle of the floor, packing a valise.

"Where are you to take it?" she asks.

"Down to the wharf, ma'am," answers the man: "Mr. Ingerfield is going to
be there for a day or two."

Then Anne sits in the great empty drawing-room, and takes _her_ turn at
thinking.

John Ingerfield finds, on his return to Limehouse, that t