and whispering to himself: "Poor girl, so young
and so pretty!" I had felt, some minutes before, as if I could have
struck the policeman, and I felt now as if I could have thrown my arms
round the doctor's neck and kissed him. I did put out my hand when he
took up his hat, and he shook it in the friendliest way. "Don't hope, my
dear," he said, and went out.

The rest of the lodgers followed him, all silent and shocked, except
the inhuman wretch who owns the house and lives in idleness on the high
rents he wrings from poor people like us.

"She's three weeks in my debt," says he, with a frown and an oath.
"Where the devil is my money to come from now?" Brute! brute!

I had a long cry alone with her that seemed to ease my heart a little.
She was not the least changed for the better when I had wiped away the
tears and could see her clearly again. I took up her right hand,
which lay nearest to me. It was tight clinched. I tried to unclasp the
fingers, and succeeded after a little time. Something dark fell out of
the palm of her hand as I straightened it.

I picked the thing up, and smoothed it out, and saw that it was an end
of a man's cravat.

A very old, rotten, dingy strip of black silk, with thin lilac lines,
all blurred and deadened with dirt, running across and across the stuff
in a sort of trellis-work pattern. The small end of the cravat was
hemmed in the usual way, but the other end was all jagged, as if the
morsel then in my hands had been torn off violently from the rest of
the stuff. A chill ran all over me as I looked at it; for that poor,
stained, crumpled end of a cravat seemed to be saying to me, as though
it had been in plain words: "If she dies, she has come to her death by
foul means, and I am the witness of it."

I had been frightened enough before, lest she should die suddenly and
quietly without my knowing it, while we were alone together; but I got
into a perfect agony now, for fear this last worst affliction should
take me by surprise. I don't suppose five minutes passed all that woful
night through without my getting up and putting my cheek close to her
mouth, to feel if the faint breaths still fluttered out of it. They came
and went just the same as at first, though the fright I was in often
made me fancy they were stilled forever.

Just as the church clocks were striking four I was startled by seeing
the room door open. It was only Dusty Sal (as they call her in the
house), the maid-of-al