yer will!"

And darting to a cupboard he pulled out a grimy candlestick with an end
of dip and some matches, disposed of them at the bottom of the
coal-scuttle that Marcella carried over her left arm, and then, still
masterfully considering her, let her go.

Marcella groped her way downstairs. The house was one of a type familiar
all over the poorer parts of West Central London--the eighteenth-century
house inhabited by law or fashion in the days of Dr. Johnson, now
parcelled out into insanitary tenements, miserably provided with air,
water, and all the necessaries of life, but still showing in its
chimney-piece or its decaying staircase signs of the graceful domestic
art which had ruled at the building and fitting of it.

Marcella, however, had no eye whatever at the moment for the panelling
on the staircase, or the delicate ironwork of the broken balustrade.
Rather it seemed to her, as she looked into some of the half-open doors
of the swarming rooms she passed, or noticed with disgust the dirt and
dilapidation of the stairs, and the evil smells of the basement, that
the house added one more to the standing shames of the district--an
opinion doubly strong in her when at last she emerged from her gropings
among the dens of the lower regions, and began to toil upstairs again
with her filled kettle and coal-scuttle.

The load was heavy, even for her young strength, and she had just passed
a sleepless night. The evening before she had been sent for in haste to
a woman in desperate illness. She came, and found a young Jewess, with a
ten days old child beside her, struggling with her husband and two women
friends in a state of raging delirium. The room, was full to suffocation
of loud-tongued, large-eyed Jewesses, all taking turns at holding the
patient, and chattering or quarrelling between their turns. It had been
Marcella's first and arduous duty to get the place cleared, and she had
done it without ever raising her voice or losing her temper for an
instant. The noisy pack had been turned out; the most competent woman
among them chosen to guard the door and fetch and carry for the nurse;
while Marcella set to work to wash her patient and remake the bed as
best she could, in the midst of the poor thing's wild shrieks and
wrestlings.

It was a task to test both muscular strength and moral force to their
utmost. After her year's training Marcella took it simply in the day's
work. Some hours of intense effort and strai