She looked very much as the bell had sounded.

She let him in to a place which it seemed might not be a bad field for some of the army’s boasted experts on sanitation.  It was a place to make one define civilization as a thing that reduces smell.

Several heads were stuck out of opening doors and with each opening door a wave stole out from an unlovely life.  Captain Wayneworth Jones, U. S. Army, dressed for dining at a place where lives are better protected against lives, was a strange center for those waves from lives of struggle.

“She the girl that’s sick?” the woman demanded in response to his inquiry for Miss Forrest.

He replied that he feared she was ill and was told to go to the third floor and turn to the right.  It was the second door.

He hesitated, coloring.

“Would you be so kind as to tell her I am here?  I think perhaps she may prefer to see me—­down here.”

The woman stared, then laughed.  She looked like an evil woman as she laughed, but perhaps a laughing saint would look evil with two front teeth gone.

“Well we ain’t got no parlor for the young ladies to see their young men in,” she said mockingly.  “And if you climbed as many stairs as I did—­”

“I beg your pardon,” said he, and started up the stairway.

On the second floor were more waves from lives of struggle.  The matter would be solemnly taken up in Congress if it were soldiers who were housed in the ill-smelling place.  Evidently Congress did not take women and children and disabled civilians under the protecting wing of its indignation.

Wet clothes were hanging down from the third floor.  They fanned back and forth the fumes of cabbage and grease.  He grew sick, not at the thing itself, but at thought of its being where he was to find Ann.

Though the fact that he was to find her made all the rest of it—­the fact that people lived that way—­even the fact of her living that way—­things that mattered but dimly.

As he looked at the woman in greasy wrapper who was shaking out the wet clothes he had a sudden mocking picture of Ann as she had been that night at the dance.

The woman’s manner in staring at him as he knocked at Ann’s door infuriated him.

But when the door was opened—­by Ann—­he instantly forgot all outside.

He closed the door and stood leaning against it, looking at her.  For the moment that was all that mattered.  And in that moment he knew how much it mattered—­had mattered all along.  Even how Ann looked was for the moment of small consequence in comparison with the fact that Ann was there.

But he saw that she was indeed ill—­worn—­feverish.

“You are not well,” were his first words, gently spoken.

She shook her head, her eyes brimming over.

He looked about the room.  It was evident she had been lying on the bed.

“I want you to lie down,” he said, his voice gentle as a woman’s to a child.  “You know you don’t mind me.  I come as one of the family.”