darkened room which was partly in the roof.

As we stepped in I heard rapid breathing, which told me that we were in
a sick chamber, and then a man's voice, very husky and weak, saying:

"Is that you, Agnes?"

"It's only me, dear," said Angela..

After a moment she turned up the solitary gas-jet, which had been
burning low, and I saw the shadowy form of a man lying in a bed that
stood in a corner. He was wasted with consumption, his long bony hands
were lying on the counterpane, his dark hair was matted over his
forehead as from sweat, but I could not mistake the large, lively grey
eyes that looked out of his long thin face. It was Father Giovanni.

Angela went up to him and kissed him, and I could see that his eyes
lighted with a smile as he saw her coming into the room.

"There's somebody with you, isn't there?" he said.

"Yes. Who do you think it is?"

"Who?"

"Don't you remember little Margaret Mary at the Sacred Heart?"

"Is this she?"

"Yes," said Angela, and then in a hoarse, angry voice the man said:

"What has she come here for?"

Angela told him that I had seen her on Piccadilly, and being a great
lady now, I (Oh heaven!) was one of the people who came out into the
streets at midnight to rescue lost ones.

"She looked as if she wondered what had brought me down to that life, so
I've fetched her home to see."

I was shocked at Angela's mistake, but before I could gather strength or
courage to correct her Giovanni was raising himself in bed and saying,
with a defiant air, his eyes blazing like watch-fires:

"She does it for me, if you want to know. I've been eleven months
ill--she does it all for me, I tell you."

And then, in one of those outbursts of animation which come to the
victims of that fell disease, he gave me a rapid account of what had
happened to them since they ran away from Rome--how at first he had
earned their living as a teacher of languages; how it became known that
he was an unfrocked and excommunicated priest who had broken his vows,
and then his pupils had left him; how they had struggled on for some
years longer, though pursued by this character as by a malignant curse;
and how at length his health had quite broken down, and he would have
starved but for Agnes (Angela being her nun's name), who had stuck to
him through everything.

While the sick man said this in his husky voice, Angela was sitting on
the bed by his side with her arm about his waist, listening to him