“They run every two or three minutes,” said Mrs. Tarbell sweetly. “Good-day.”

“Here’s one now,” said Mrs. Stiles.  “Mrs. Tarbell, I just wanted to say—­mebbe you might think I wasn’t appreciative of your kindness, and that all I cared about was—­”

“Not at all,” said Mrs. Tarbell.  “Not at all, I assure you.  I understand, perfectly.  You will miss your—­”

“That’s so, that’s so,” said Mrs. Stiles.  “Driver! driver!” And she ran down the steps, flourishing her umbrella wildly.

Mrs. Tarbell put up her own umbrella, and looked down the street.  The rain splashed up from the pavement, the tree-boxes were wet and dismal, the little rivers in the gutters raced along, shaking their tawny manes, the umbrellas of the passing pedestrians were sleek and dripping, like the coats of the seals in the Zoological Garden.  Now that she was rid of Mrs. Stiles, was it absolutely necessary for her to go out?  She hesitated a moment.

Suddenly she heard a cry from the street.  Two or three men in front of her stopped quickly, and then ran toward the prostrate figure of somebody who had fallen from the car which had halted a few steps farther on.  The car-horses were plunging and swinging from one side of the car to the other; the conductor had alighted and was hurrying back toward the victim of the accident; the passengers were pushing out on the back platform.  Mrs. Stiles had slipped or been thrown down on the muddy car-track.  Mrs. Tarbell recognized her long black figure as it was lifted up.  A sad sight the poor woman was, her india-rubber cloak spotted and streaked with mud and muddy water, her head hanging back from her shoulders, her face the color of a miller’s coat exactly,—­a dirty, grayish white,—­and her arms shaking about with the motion of her bearers.  She had fainted; her bearers were looking about in the hope of seeing an apothecary’s shop, or some other such occasional hospital, when Mrs. Tarbell accosted them.

Mrs. Tarbell stood in the established attitude of a woman in front of a rainy-day gutter, holding her skirts with one hand and leaning forward at such an angle that the drippings from the mid-rib of her umbrella fell in equal streams upon the small of her back and a point precisely thirteen inches from the tips of her galoshes.

“Bring her in here,” cried Mrs, Tarbell, shaking her umbrella.  “Bring her in here.”  And she waved the umbrella in an elliptical curve about her head.

“Where?” said the foremost of those addressed, an active-looking man with a red moustache, a wet fur cap, and an umbrella under his arm.

“Here,” said Mrs. Tarbell, thrusting her umbrella at the Land and Water Company’s building.  To make her directions more accurate, she went to the steps and nodded at the hall-way.

“The lady is my—­has just been having a consultation with me,” said Mrs. Tarbell to the man in the red moustache, “and—­”