Under his breath I heard a smothered exclamation from Selwyn.  He was standing in front of the boy, hands in his pockets, and staring at him.  He knew, of course, there were countless ill-fed, ill-clothed, unprotected children in every city of every land, but personally he had come in contact with but few of them, and the bit of flesh and blood before him stabbed with sharp realization.  Helplessly he turned to me.  “The boy’s half frozen.  Where did he come from?  What does he want you to do?”

Jimmy looked up at me.  “Mother told me to hurry.  The doctor’s done gone and Mrs. Cotter says she’s bound to see you before she dies.  She’s got something to tell you.  She says please, ’m, come quick.”

Hesitating, I looked at the boy, who had come closer to the fire.  “Did the doctor say she was dying?  I saw her yesterday and she seemed better.  Miss White was to see her to-day.”

“Miss White is there now.”  Jimmy lifted his right foot and held it from the ground.  The warmth of the room was bringing pain to the benumbed member into which something had been stuck.  “She told me to tell you please, ’m, to come if you could.  Mrs. Cotter says she can’t die until she sees you, and she’s so tired trying to hold out.  She won’t have breath left to talk, mother says, if you don’t hurry.”

Perplexed, uncertain, I waited a half-minute longer.  Mrs. Cotter, the renter of Mrs. Gibbons’s middle room, and sometime boarder, I had seen frequently of late.  Nothing human could have stood what she had been forcing herself to do for some weeks past, and that resistance should have yielded to relentless exaction was not to be wondered at.  Ten hours a day she sewed in the carpet department of one of the city’s big stores, and for some time past she had been one of the office-cleaning force of the Metropolitan Building, which at night made ready for the day’s occupants the rooms which were swept and dusted and scrubbed while others slept or played, or rested or made plans for coming times.  The extra work had been undertaken in order to get nourishment and medicine needed for her little girl, who had developed tuberculosis.  There was nowhere for the child to go.  The insufficient sanatorium provided by the city for its diseased and germ-disseminating poor was over-crowded.  To save her child she had fought valiantly, but her life was the forfeit of her fight.  I wondered what she wanted to tell me.

I looked at Selwyn, in my eyes questioning.  Mrs. Mundy was out.  I could not leave Bettina alone in the house.  What must I do?

“Do you think she is really dying?  People like that are often hysterical, often nervously imaginative.”  Selwyn’s voice was worried.  “You ought not to be sent for like this.  It isn’t right.”

“She wouldn’t have sent as late as this, but the doctor says she won’t last till daybreak.”  Jimmy twisted his cap into a round, rough ball.  “I’ll get Mrs. Mundy for Bettina if you’ll tell me where she is.”