with
a sort of pride and looking at me with a kind of triumph.

"I dare say you wonder why I didn't try to get work," she said. "I
_could_ have got it if I had wanted to. I could have got it at the
Italian laundry. But what was two shillings a day to a man who was
ordered new milk and fresh eggs five times every twenty-four hours, not
to speak of the house rent?"

"She ought to have let me die first," said Giovanni, and then, looking
at me again with his large, glittering, fierce eyes, he said:

"_You_ think she ought to have let me die, don't you?"

"No, no, no," I said--it was all I _could_ say, for their mistake about
myself was choking me.

Perhaps my emotion appeased both of them, for after a moment Angela beat
out Giovanni's pillow and straightened his counterpane, and then told
him to lie down and be quiet, while she brought a chair for me and took
off her things in her own bedroom.

But hardly had she gone into an adjoining chamber when the sick man
raised himself again and, reaching over in my direction, told me in a
hoarse whisper the story of the first night of her present way of
life--how the doctor had said he must be removed to the hospital; how
Agnes would not part with him; how the landlord had threatened to turn
them out; and how at last, after sitting with her head in her hands the
whole evening, Aggie had got up and gone out and, coming back at
midnight, had thrown two sovereigns on the table and said, "There you
are, Giovanni--that's our rent and your eggs and milk for one week,
anyway."

By this time Angela had returned to the room (her paint and rouge washed
off, and her gay clothes replaced by a simple woollen jacket over a
plain underskirt), and she began to beat up an egg, to boil some milk,
to pour out a dose of medicine, and to do, with all a good woman's tact,
a good woman's tenderness, the little services of which an invalid
stands in need.

Oh heavens, how beautiful it was--fearfully, awfully tragically
beautiful!

I was deeply moved as I sat in silence watching her; and when at length
Giovanni, who had been holding her hand in his own long, bony ones and
sometimes putting it to his lips, dropped off to sleep (tired out,
perhaps, by talking to me), and she, drawing up to where I sat by the
end of the bed, resumed her self-defence, saying in a whisper that
ladies like me could not possibly understand what a woman would do, in
spite of herself, when the life of one she loved was