Presently Mrs. Lancaster stopped.

“This is the number.”

It was an old house between two other old houses.

Mrs. Lancaster made some inquiries of a slatternly woman who sat sewing just inside the doorway, and the latter said there was such a person as she asked for in a room on the fourth floor.  She knew nothing about her except that she was very sick and mostly out of her head.  The health-doctor had been to see her, and talked about sending her to a hospital.

The three made their way up the narrow stairs and through the dark passages, so dark that matches had to be lighted to show them the way.  Several times Mr. Rimmon protested against Mrs. Lancaster going farther.  Such holes were abominable; some one ought to be prosecuted for it.  Finally the woman stopped at a door.

“She’s in here.”  She pushed the door open without knocking, and walked in, followed by Mrs. Lancaster and Mr. Rimmon.  It was a cupboard hardly more than ten feet square, with a little window that looked out on a dead-wall not more than an arm’s-length away.

A bed, a table made of an old box, and another box which served as a stool, constituted most of the furniture, and in the bed, under a ragged coverlid, lay the form of the sick woman.

“There’s a lady and a priest come to see you,” said the guide, not unkindly.  She turned to Mrs. Lancaster.  “I don’t know as you can make much of her.  Sometimes she’s right flighty.”

The sick woman turned her head a little and looked at them out of her sunken eyes.

“Thank you.  Won’t you be seated?” she said, with a politeness and a softness of tone that sounded almost uncanny coming from such a source.

“We heard that you were sick, and have come to see if we could not help you,” said Mrs. Lancaster, in a tone of sympathy, leaning over the bed.

“Yes,” said Mr. Rimmon, in his full, rich voice, which made the little room resound; “it is our high province to minister to the sick, and through the kindness of this dear lady we may be able to remove you to more commodious quarters—­to some one of the charitable institutions which noble people like our friend here have endowed for such persons as yourself?”

[Illustration:  “It is he!  ’Tis he!” she cried.]

Something about the full-toned voice with its rising inflection caught the invalid’s attention, and she turned her eyes on him with a quick glance, and, half raising her head, scanned his face closely.

“Mr. Rimmon, here, may be able to help you in other ways too,” Mrs. Lancaster again began; but she got no further.  The name appeared to electrify the woman.

With a shriek she sat up in bed.

“It is he!  ’Tis he!” she cried.  “You are the very one.  You will help me, won’t you?  You will find him and bring him back to me?” She reached out her thin arms to him in an agony of supplication.

“I will help you,—­I shall be glad to do so,—­but whom am I to bring back?  How can I help you?”