“It’s George,” Gabriella explained in a harsh voice.  “I found him in the street.  He was looking for me, and I couldn’t leave him to freeze.  I think he’s either drunk or ill.  I don’t know which it is, but it sounds like pneumonia.”

“God have mercy!” exclaimed Miss Polly, which was quite as lucid as she ever became in a crisis.  Her face had turned blue, she was trembling with terror, and the violence of her palpitations almost exceeded the painful sounds in George’s chest.  “If there was only a man we could send for,” she wailed hysterically.  “Oh, Gabriella, if there was only a man!”

“Well, there’s the doctor,” replied Gabriella shortly.  “You’d better telephone for him at once.  Get the nearest one.  I think his name is McFarland.”

“And a nurse?  You’ll want a nurse, won’t you?”

“I’ll want anything I can get, and I’ll want it quickly.  There, hurry, while I find a bathrobe of Archibald’s.  He’s wet through—­soaking wet.  He must have been out all day in the storm.”

Miss Polly vanished into the dimness of the hall, and after a few minutes Gabriella heard her fluttering voice demanding a telephone number as if she were still supplicating the Deity.

“Take off your wet clothes while I get you a drink and some hot blankets!” said Gabriella when she had found one of Archibald’s bathrobes in the closet.  It occurred to her that George was really incapable of undressing himself, but she felt that she would rather die than touch him again.  The loathing which had overpowered her outside in the storm became stronger in the close air of the house.  “I can’t touch him.  I don’t care what happens I can’t touch him,” she told herself, while she placed the flannel robe on the rug, and hurried back to the kitchen.  Her whole body was benumbed and chilled, not from cold, but from disgust, yet her mind was almost unnaturally active, and she found herself thinking over and over again:  “So this is the man I loved, this is the man I married instead of Arthur!”

When she came back with a cup of broth and some hot blankets, she found George in the flannel gown of Archibald’s, with his wet clothes on the floor at his feet, from which he had forgotten to remove his shoes.  He drank the soup greedily, while Miss Polly lighted the wood-fire she had laid in the open grate.

“The heat’s comin’ up all right in the radiator,” she said, “but I thought a blaze might make him more comfortable.”

“Yes, it’s better,” replied Gabriella sternly, while she stooped to unlace George’s boots.  There was no compassion in her heart, and it seemed to her, while she struggled with the wet lacing, that the fumes of whiskey spread contagion and disease over the room.  She was not only hard and bitter—­she felt that she loathed him with unspeakable loathing.

“I declare, Gabriella, I believe he has gone deranged!” Miss Polly cried out sharply, dropping the poker and starting to her feet in an erratic impulse of flight.