“You mean Garvin?” Mr. Bentley demanded.

“It’s him I mean, sir.”

“We’d like to go in,” said Mr. Bentley.  “We came to see them.”

“You’re welcome, air, and the minister too.  It’s only them I’m holdin’ back,” and the policeman shook his stick at the people.

Mr. Bentley walked up the steps, and took off his hat as he went through the battered doorway.  Hodder followed, with a sense of curious faces staring at them from the thresholds as they passed; they reached the upper passage, and the room, and paused:  the shutters were closed, the little couch where the child had been was empty.  On the bed lay a form —­covered with a sheet, and beside it a woman kneeling, shaken by sobs, ceaselessly calling a name . . . .

A stout figure, hitherto unperceived, rose from a corner and came silently toward them—­Mrs. Breitmann.  She beckoned to them, and they followed her into a room on the same floor, where she told them what she knew, heedless of the tears coursing ceaselessly down her cheeks.

It seemed that Mrs. Garvin had had a premonition which she had not wholly confided to the rector.  She had believed her husband never would come back; and early in the morning, in spite of all that Mrs. Breitmann could do, had insisted at intervals upon running downstairs and scanning the street.  At half past seven Dr. Jarvis had come and himself carried down the child and put him in the back of his automobile.  The doctor had had a nurse with him, and had begged the mother to accompany them to the hospital, saying that he would send her back.  But she would not be persuaded to leave the house.  The doctor could not wait, and had finally gone off with little.  Dicky, leaving a powder with Mrs. Breitmann for the mother.  Then she had become uncontrollable.

“Ach, it was terrible!” said the kind woman.  “She was crazy, yes—­she was not in her mind.  I make a little coffee, but she will not touch it.  All those things about her home she would talk of, and how good he was, and how she lofed him more again than the child.

“Und then the wheels in the street, and she makes a cry and runs to see —­I cannot hold her . . . .”

“It would be well not to disturb her for a while,” said Mr. Bentley, seating himself on one of the dilapidated chairs which formed apart of the German woman’s meagre furniture.  “I will remain here if you, Mr. Hodder, will make the necessary arrangements for the funeral.  Have you any objections, sir?”

“Not at all,” replied the rector, and left the house, the occupants of which had already returned to the daily round of their lives:  the rattle of dishes and the noise of voices were heard in the ‘ci devant’ parlour, and on the steps he met the little waif with the pitcher of beer; in the street the boys who had gathered around the ambulance were playing baseball.  Hodder glanced up, involuntarily, at the window of the woman he had visited the night before, but it was empty.  He hurried along the littered sidewalks to the drug store, where he telephoned an undertaker; and then, as an afterthought, telephoned the hospital.  The boy had arrived, and was seemingly no worse for the journey.