“I’ll speak to her,” he said.

Mrs. Garvin did not appear to hear him, but flung herself down beside the lounge.  As he seized his hat and left the room he had the idea of telephoning for a nurse, when he almost ran into some one in the upper hall, and recognized the stout German woman, Mrs. Breitmann.

“Mrs. Garvin”—­he said, “she ought not to be left—­”

“I am just now going,” said Mrs. Breitmann.  “I stay with her until her husband come.”

Such was the confidence with which, for some reason, she inspired him, that he left with an easier mind.

It was not until the rector had arrived at the vestibule of the apartment house next door that something—­of the difficulty and delicacy of the errand he had undertaken came home to him.  Impulse had brought him thus far, but now he stood staring helplessly at a row of bells, speaking tubes, and cards.  Which, for example, belonged to the lady whose soprano voice pervaded the neighbourhood?  He looked up and down the street, in the vain hope of finding a messenger.  The song continued:  he had promised to stop it.  Hodder accused himself of cowardice.

To his horror, Hodder felt stealing over him, incredible though it seemed after the depths through which he had passed, a faint sense of fascination in the adventure.  It was this that appalled him—­this tenacity of the flesh,—­which no terrors seemed adequate to drive out.  The sensation, faint as it was, unmanned him.  There were still many unexplored corners in his soul.

He turned, once more contemplated the bells, and it was not until then he noticed that the door was ajar.  He pushed it open, climbed the staircase, and stood in the doorway of what might be called a sitting room, his eyes fixed on a swaying back before an upright piano against the wall; his heart seemed to throb with the boisterous beat of the music.  The woman’s hair, in two long and heavy plaits falling below her waist, suddenly fascinated him.  It was of the rarest of russet reds.  She came abruptly to the end of the song.

“I beg your pardon—­” he began.

She swung about with a start, her music dropping to the floor, and stared at him.  Her tattered blue kimono fell away at her elbows, her full throat was bare, and a slipper she had kicked off lay on the floor beside her.  He recoiled a little, breathing deeply.  She stared at him.

“My God, how you scared me!” she exclaimed.  Evidently a second glance brought to her a realization of his clerical costume.  “Say, how did you get in here?”

“I beg your pardon,” he said again, “but there is a very sick child in the house next door and I came to ask you if you would mind not playing any more to-night.”

She did not reply at once, and her expression he found unsolvable.  Much of it might be traced to a life which had contracted the habit of taking nothing on trust, a life which betrayed itself in unmistakable traces about the eyes.  And Hodder perceived that the face, if the stamp of this expression could have been removed, was not unpleasing, although indulgence and recklessness were beginning to remould it.