“I shall come at once.”

The door was curtly closed.

“So that’s how you call a doctor in the middle of the night!” thought Louis, and ran off.  He had scarcely deciphered the man’s face.

The return, being chiefly downhill, was less exhausting.  As he approached his aunt’s house he saw that there was a light on the ground floor as well as in the front bedroom.  The door opened as he swung the gate.  The lobby gas had been lighted.  Rachel was waiting for him.  Her hair was tied up now.  The girl looked wise, absurdly so.  It was as though she was engaged in the act of being equal to the terrible occasion.

“He’s coming,” said Louis.

“You’ve been frightfully quick!” said she, as if triumphantly.  She appeared to glory in the crisis.

He passed within as she held the door.  He was frantic to rush upstairs to the fireplace in his room; but he had to seem deliberate.

“And what next?” he inquired.

“Well, nothing.  It’ll be best for you to sit in your bedroom for a bit.  That’s the only place where there’s a fire—­and it’s rather chilly at this time of night.”

“A fire?” he repeated, incredulous and yet awe-struck.

“I knew you wouldn’t mind,” said she.  “It just happened there wasn’t two drops of methylated spirits left in the house, and as there was a fire laid in your room, I put a match to it.  I must have hot water ready, you see.  And Mrs. Maldon only has one of those old-fashioned gas-stoves in her bedroom—­”

“I see,” he agreed.

They mounted the steps together.  The grate in his room was a mass of pleasant flames, in the midst of which gleamed the bright kettle.

“How is she now?” He asked in a trance.  And he felt as though it was another man in his own body who was asking.

“Oh!  It’s not very serious, I hope,” said Rachel, kneeling to coax the fire with a short, wiry poker.  “Only you never know.  I’m just going in again....  She seems to lose all her vitality—­that’s what’s apt to frighten you.”

The girl looked wise—­absurdly, deliciously wise.  The spectacle of her engaged in the high act of being equal to the occasion was exquisite.  But Louis had no eye for it.

CHAPTER V

NEWS OF THE NIGHT

I

The next morning, Mrs. Tarns, the charwoman whom Rachel had expressly included in the dogma that all charwomen are alike, was cleaning the entranceway to Mrs. Maldon’s house.  She had washed and stoned the steep, uneven flight of steps leading up to the front door, and the flat space between them and the gate; and now, before finishing the step down to the footpath, she was wiping the grimy ledges of the green iron gate itself.

Mrs. Tarns was a woman of nearly sixty, stout and—­in appearance—­untidy and dirty.  The wet wind played with grey wisps of her hair, and with her coarse brown apron, beneath which her skirt was pinned up.  Human eye so seldom saw her without a coarse brown apron that, apronless, she would have almost seemed (like Eve) to be unattired.  It and a pail were the insignia of her vocation.