At the same moment he saw that they were alone.  The policeman had cleared the room, and was spending the few minutes that must elapse before his companion returned with the stretcher, in taking the names and evidence of some of the inmates of the house, on the stairs outside.

“You can’t do anything more,” said Aldous, gently, bending over her.  “Won’t you let me take you home?—­you want it sorely.  The police are trained to these things, and I have a friend here who will help.  They will remove her with every care—­he will see to it.”

Then for the first time her absorption gave way.  She remembered who he was—­where they were—­how they had last met.  And with the remembrance came an extraordinary leap of joy, flashing through pain and faintness.  She had the childish feeling that he could not look unkindly at her anymore—­after this!  When at the White House she had got herself into disgrace, and could not bring her pride to ask pardon, she would silently set up a headache or a cut finger that she might be pitied, and so, perforce, forgiven.  The same tacit thought was in her mind now.  No!—­after this he must be friends with her.

“I will just help to get her downstairs,” she said, but with a quivering, appealing accent—­and so they fell silent.

Aldous looked round the room—­at the miserable filthy garret with its begrimed and peeling wall-paper, its two or three broken chairs, its heap of rags across two boxes that served for a bed; its empty gin-bottles here and there—­all the familiar, one might almost say conventionalised, signs of human ruin and damnation—­then at this breathing death between himself and her.  Perhaps his strongest feeling was one of fierce and natural protest against circumstance—­against her mother!—­against a reckless philanthropy that could thus throw the finest and fragilest things of a poorly-furnished world into such a hopeless struggle with devildom.

“I have been here several times before,” she said presently, in a faint voice, “and there has never been any trouble.  By day the street is not much worse than others—­though, of course, it has a bad name.  There is a little boy on the next floor very ill with typhoid.  Many of the women in the house are very good to him and his mother.  This poor thing—­used to come in and out—­when I was nursing him—­Oh, I wish—­I wish they would come!” she broke off in impatience, looking at the deathly form—­“every moment is of importance!”

As Aldous went to the door to see if the stretcher was in sight, it opened, and the police came in.  Marcella, herself helpless, directed the lifting of the bloodstained head; the police obeyed her with care and skill.  Then Raeburn assisted in the carrying downstairs, and presently the police with their burden, and accompanied apparently by the whole street, were on their way to the nearest hospital.

Then Aldous, to his despair and wrath, saw that an inspector of police, who had just come up, was talking to Marcella, no doubt instructing her as to how and where she was to give her evidence.  She was leaning against the passage wall, supporting her injured arm with her hand, and seemed to him on the point of fainting.