The old woman nodded, and as she turned to limp down the passage, her ball of gray yarn slipped from her grasp and rolled after her until Corinna recovered it.  In silence the cripple led the way, and in silence they followed her, until she opened the closed door at the end of the hall, and they entered the room, with the sickening sweetish smell and the window which gave on the black hulk of the ailantus tree.  From behind a screen, which was covered with faded wall paper, the figure of the doctor emerged while they waited, an ample middle-aged man, with the air of having got into his clothes in a hurry and the face of a pragmatic philosopher.  He motioned commandingly for them to approach; and going to the other side of the screen, they found the dying woman gazing at them with eager eyes.

“She is doing nicely,” remarked the doctor, with the cheerful alacrity of one in whom familiarity has bred contempt of death.  “Keep her quiet.  One can never tell about these cases.”

He made an explanatory gesture in the direction of his pocket.  “I’ll go down on the porch and smoke a cigar, and then if she hasn’t had a relapse, I think it will be safe for me to go home.  You can telephone if you need me.  I am only a few blocks away.”  He went out with a brisk, elastic step, while his hand began to feel for the end of the cigar in his pocket.

“She’s bad now,” said the old woman.  “It’s the medicine, but she’ll come to in a minute.”  She brought two wooden chairs with broken legs to the foot of the bed.  “You’d better sit down.  It may be a long waiting.”

“I hope she’ll know me,” returned Patty.  “She must have wanted to see me, or she wouldn’t have sent.”  Her eyes left the stricken face and clung to the calla lily on the window-sill, as they had done that afternoon when she came here with Gershom.  The single blossom on the lily had not faded; it was still as perfect as it had been then—­only two days ago!—­and not one of the closed buds had begun to open beside it.

“Oh, she wanted to see you,” answered the old woman, in a croaking voice which seemed to Corinna to contain a sinister note.  “As long as she was able to keep on her feet she used to go and sit in the Square just to watch you come out—­”

“Do you mean that she cared for me like that?” asked the girl, in a hushed incredulous tone.  “Was she really fond of me?”

The cripple turned her glassy eyes on the fresh young face.  “Well, I don’t know that she was fond,” she responded bleakly, “but when you’re as bad off as that, there ain’t many things that you can think of.”