Suddenly—­the room was empty, for Minta had just gone away with the tea—­by a kind of subtle reaction, the face in that photograph on Hallin’s table flashed into her mind—­its look—­the grizzled hair.  With an uncontrollable pang of pain she dropped her hands from the fastenings of her cloak, and wrung them together in front of her—­a dumb gesture of contrition and of grief.

She!—­she talk of social reform and “character,” she give her opinion, as of right, on points of speculation and of ethics, she, whose main achievement so far had been to make a good man suffer!  Something belittling and withering swept over all her estimate of herself, all her pleasant self-conceit.  Quietly, with downcast eyes, she went her way.

CHAPTER VII.

Her first case was in Brown’s Buildings itself—­a woman suffering from bronchitis and heart complaint, and tormented besides by an ulcerated foot which Marcella had now dressed daily for some weeks.  She lived on the top floor of one of the easterly blocks, with two daughters and a son of eighteen.

When Marcella entered the little room it was as usual spotlessly clean and smelt of flowers.  The windows were open, and a young woman was busy shirt-ironing on a table in the centre of the room.  Both she and her mother looked up with smiles as Marcella entered.  Then, they introduced her with some ceremony to a “lady,” who was sitting beside the patient, a long-faced melancholy woman employed at the moment in marking linen handkerchiefs, which she did with extraordinary fineness and delicacy.  The patient and her daughter spoke of Marcella to their friend as “the young person,” but all with a natural courtesy and charm that could not have been surpassed.

Marcella knelt to undo the wrappings of the foot.  The woman, a pale transparent creature, winced painfully as the dressing was drawn off; but between each half stifled moan of pain she said something eager and grateful to her nurse.  “I never knew any one, Nurse, do it as gentle as you—­” or—­“I do take it kind of you, Nurse, to do it so slow—­oh! there were a young person before you—­” or “hasn’t she got nice hands, Mrs. Burton? they don’t never seem to jar yer.”

“Poor foot! but I think it is looking better,” said Marcella, getting up at last from her work, when all was clean and comfortable and she had replaced the foot on the upturned wooden box that supported it—­for its owner was not in bed, but sitting propped up in an old armchair.  “And how is your cough, Mrs. Jervis?”

“Oh! it’s very bad, nights,” said Mrs. Jervis, mildly—­“disturbs Emily dreadful.  But I always pray every night, when she lifts me into bed, as I may be took before the morning, an’ God ull do it soon.”

“Mother!” cried Emily, pausing in her ironing, “you know you oughtn’t to say them things.”

Mrs. Jervis looked at her with a sly cheerfulness.  Her emaciated face was paler than usual because of the pain of the dressing, but from the frail form there breathed an indomitable air of life, a gay courage indeed which had already struck Marcella with wonder.