“I thought I’d better wait, sir,” he said.  “It’s a pretty rough neighbour’ood, and them not knowing who you was.”

Philip laughed.

“Bless your heart, they all know the doctor, I’ve been in some damned sight rougher places than Waver Street.”

It was quite true.  The black bag was a passport through wretched alleys and down foul-smelling courts into which a policeman was not ready to venture by himself.  Once or twice a little group of men had looked at Philip curiously as he passed; he heard a mutter of observations and then one say: 

“It’s the ’orspital doctor.”

As he went by one or two of them said:  “Good-night, sir.”

“We shall ’ave to step out if you don’t mind, sir,” said the man who accompanied him now.  “They told me there was no time to lose.”

“Why did you leave it so late?” asked Philip, as he quickened his pace.

He glanced at the fellow as they passed a lamp-post.

“You look awfully young,” he said.

“I’m turned eighteen, sir.”

He was fair, and he had not a hair on his face, he looked no more than a boy; he was short, but thick set.

“You’re young to be married,” said Philip.

“We ’ad to.”

“How much d’you earn?”

“Sixteen, sir.”

Sixteen shillings a week was not much to keep a wife and child on.  The room the couple lived in showed that their poverty was extreme.  It was a fair size, but it looked quite large, since there was hardly any furniture in it; there was no carpet on the floor; there were no pictures on the walls; and most rooms had something, photographs or supplements in cheap frames from the Christmas numbers of the illustrated papers.  The patient lay on a little iron bed of the cheapest sort.  It startled Philip to see how young she was.

“By Jove, she can’t be more than sixteen,” he said to the woman who had come in to `see her through.’

She had given her age as eighteen on the card, but when they were very young they often put on a year or two.  Also she was pretty, which was rare in those classes in which the constitution has been undermined by bad food, bad air, and unhealthy occupations; she had delicate features and large blue eyes, and a mass of dark hair done in the elaborate fashion of the coster girl.  She and her husband were very nervous.

“You’d better wait outside, so as to be at hand if I want you,” Philip said to him.

Now that he saw him better Philip was surprised again at his boyish air:  you felt that he should be larking in the street with the other lads instead of waiting anxiously for the birth of a child.  The hours passed, and it was not till nearly two that the baby was born.  Everything seemed to be going satisfactorily; the husband was called in, and it touched Philip to see the awkward, shy way in which he kissed his wife; Philip packed up his things.  Before going he felt once more his patient’s pulse.