“I needn’t tell him—­not just yet, anyhow.  But are you really and truly sure that she is my mother’s sister?”

“Well, they had the same parents, and I reckon that makes ’em sisters if anything does.  I knew ’em both out yonder in California, and I never heard anybody suggest they weren’t related.”

“Why did she come here?  Was it to see me?”

“Partly that, and partly—­well, she’s been pretty sick.  I reckon she’s likely to go off at any time, and she wanted to be back where she was born.  She had pneumonia two years ago, and then again last winter.  Her lungs are about used up.”

“Then, if I went to see her, I’d better go now, hadn’t I?”

“It would be surer.  Something may happen almost any day.  That’s why I spoke to you.”

“I am glad you did.  If it isn’t far, will you take me now?”

But instead of walking on with her, he dug the end of his stick more firmly between the pavement and the curbstone.  “I don’t want to do you any harm, Patty,” he said gently at last.  “It may give you a shock to see her, you know.  She’s been through some hard times, and she’s about come to the end of her rope.  Good Lord, the way life is!  When I first saw her out in California she was one of the prettiest pieces of flesh I ever laid eyes on.  She had something of your look, too, though you wouldn’t believe it now.”

But the girl had already started to cross the street.  “Don’t let’s waste any time talking.  Which way do we go?”

At her decision his hesitation vanished, and he joined her with a laugh and a flourish of the diamond ring on the little finger of his left hand.  “Well, you are a sport, Patty!  You always were, even when you weren’t much more than knee high to a duck.  If you’ve made up your mind to go, you won’t be blaming me afterward?”

“Oh, I shan’t blame you, of course.  Do we turn up this street?”

“Yes, go ahead.  It ain’t far—­just a little way up Leigh Street.”

They walked on rapidly, and presently, so swift and determined was Patty’s step, Gershom ceased to speak, and only glanced at her now and then in a furtive and anxious way.  There was a look of tragic resolution on her small face—­oh, she was meeting life in earnest, she reflected—­and even to the coarse mind and the dull imagination of the man beside her, she assumed gradually the appearance of some ethereal messenger.  At the moment she was thinking of Stephen, but this he did not suspect.  He saw only that there was something almost unearthly in her expression; and he felt the kind of awe that came over him on Sunday when he entered a church.  He wouldn’t hurt the girl, he told himself, with a twinge, for a pocketful of money.

They had turned into Leigh Street, and had walked some distance in silence, when Patty asked suddenly without looking round, “Then she doesn’t know I am coming?”

“I told her I’d bring you whenever I could; but she ain’t looking for you this evening.  There, that’s the house—­the one in the middle, with that wooden swing and all those kids in the yard.”