“Help! help! help! good people.  Ah, if that be a nurse, let her come hither.  There be five dying and two dead in the house, and none but me to tend them, and methinks I am stricken to the death!”

“Janet,” said Dinah, with a searching glance at her niece, “methinks I must needs answer that cry.  Go with this good woman, and do what thou canst for her husband.  Thou dost know what is best to be done.  I will come to thee anon; but thou wilt not fear to be thus left?  There is but one sick in this house.  The need is sorer elsewhere.”

“Go, I will do my best.  At least I can make a poultice, and see that he is put to bed.  I have medicaments in my bag.  I would not hinder thee.  Sure there is work for all in this terrible place!”

“And this is only one of many scattered throughout the city!” breathed Gertrude softly, her heart swelling within her.

Ever since she had halted before this house she had been aware of the sound of plaintive weeping and wailing proceeding from the adjoining tenement; and as Dinah moved away towards the door opposite, she asked Elizabeth Harwood what the sound meant, and if there was trouble in the next house.

“Trouble?—­trouble and death everywhere!” was the answer.  “The man was taken away in the cart yesternight.  God alone knows who is alive in the house now.  There be seven little children there with their mother, but which of them be living and which dead by now no one knows.  I have heard nothing of the woman’s voice these many hours.  Pray Heaven she be not dead—­and the little helpless children all alone with the dead corpse!”

“Oh, surely that could not be!” cried Gertrude.  “Surely the watchman would go to them!  Oh, that must not be!  I will go and speak with him.  He would not leave them to perish so!”

The woman shook her head, and hurried up the stairs whither her husband had been carried.  Her heart was too full of her own anxious misery to have room for more than a passing sympathy for the needs and troubles of others.

But Gertrude could not rest.  She neither followed Janet into this house nor her aunt across the street.  She went to the door of the next house, upon which the red cross had been painted; and seeing her so stand before it, a man detached himself from a group hard by and asked her business, since the house was closed.

“I am a nurse,” answered Gertrude, boldly.  “I have come to nurse the sick.  Let me into this house, I pray, for I hear the need is very sore.”

“Sore enough, mistress,” answered the man, fumbling with his key, for of course there was admittance to plague nurses and doctors into infected houses; “but if you take my advice, you’ll not venture within the door.  The dead cart has had four from it these last two days.  Like enough by this time they are all dead.  They have asked for nothing these past ten hours—­not since the cart came last night.”

With a shudder of pity and horror, but without any personal shrinking, Gertrude signed to the man to open the door, which he proceeded to do in a leisurely manner.  Then she stepped across the threshold, the door was closed behind her, and she heard the key turn in the lock.