And darting to a cupboard he pulled out a grimy candlestick with an end of dip and some matches, disposed of them at the bottom of the coal-scuttle that Marcella carried over her left arm, and then, still masterfully considering her, let her go.

Marcella groped her way downstairs.  The house was one of a type familiar all over the poorer parts of West Central London—­the eighteenth-century house inhabited by law or fashion in the days of Dr. Johnson, now parcelled out into insanitary tenements, miserably provided with air, water, and all the necessaries of life, but still showing in its chimney-piece or its decaying staircase signs of the graceful domestic art which had ruled at the building and fitting of it.

Marcella, however, had no eye whatever at the moment for the panelling on the staircase, or the delicate ironwork of the broken balustrade.  Rather it seemed to her, as she looked into some of the half-open doors of the swarming rooms she passed, or noticed with disgust the dirt and dilapidation of the stairs, and the evil smells of the basement, that the house added one more to the standing shames of the district—­an opinion doubly strong in her when at last she emerged from her gropings among the dens of the lower regions, and began to toil upstairs again with her filled kettle and coal-scuttle.

The load was heavy, even for her young strength, and she had just passed a sleepless night.  The evening before she had been sent for in haste to a woman in desperate illness.  She came, and found a young Jewess, with a ten days old child beside her, struggling with her husband and two women friends in a state of raging delirium.  The room, was full to suffocation of loud-tongued, large-eyed Jewesses, all taking turns at holding the patient, and chattering or quarrelling between their turns.  It had been Marcella’s first and arduous duty to get the place cleared, and she had done it without ever raising her voice or losing her temper for an instant.  The noisy pack had been turned out; the most competent woman among them chosen to guard the door and fetch and carry for the nurse; while Marcella set to work to wash her patient and remake the bed as best she could, in the midst of the poor thing’s wild shrieks and wrestlings.

It was a task to test both muscular strength and moral force to their utmost.  After her year’s training Marcella took it simply in the day’s work.  Some hours of intense effort and strain; then she and the husband looked down upon the patient, a woman of about six-and-twenty, plunged suddenly in narcotic sleep, her matted black hair, which Marcella had not dared to touch, lying in wild waves on the clean bed-clothes and night-gear that her nurse had extracted from this neighbour and that—­she could hardly have told how.

“Ach, mein Gott, mein Gott!” said the husband, rising and shaking himself.  He was a Jew from German Poland, and, unlike most of his race, a huge man, with the make and the muscles of a prize-fighter.  Yet, after the struggle of the last two hours he was in a bath of perspiration.