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By Root 1563 0

their dark and perilous ascent in safety, she stood still in a low passage into which two or three other doors opened. She knocked at the first of these, and, receiving no answer, turned the handle quietly and looked in. There was no furniture in it except a broken wooden bedstead; innumerable flies buzzed on the closed window, and in the slant of sunlight that fell through the dim panes was a box from which a turkey reared its red throat, and regarded her with a suspicion born, like her chickens, of long hatching. Charlotte closed the door and noiselessly opened the next. There was nothing in the room, which was of the ordinary low-ceiled cottage type, and after a calculating look at the broken flooring and the tattered wall-paper, she went quietly out into the passage again. “Good servants’ room,” she said to herself, “but if she’s here much longer it’ll be past praying for.”

If she had been in any doubt as to Miss Duffy’s whereabouts, a voice from the room at the end of the little passage now settled the matter. “Is that Peggy?” it called.

Charlotte pushed boldly into the room with the bowl of gruel.

“No, Miss Duffy, me poor old friend, it’s me, Charlotte Mullen,” she said in her most cordial voice; “they told me below you were ill, but I thought you’d see me, and I brought your gruel up in my hand. I hope you’ll like it none the less for that!”

The invalid turned her night-capped head round from the wall and looked at her visitor with astonished, bloodshot eyes. Her hatchety face was very yellow, her long nose was rather red, and her black hair thrust itself out round the soiled frill of her night-cap in dingy wisps.

“You’re welcome, Miss Mullen,” she said with a pitiable attempt at dignity; “won’t you take a cheer?”

“Not till I’ve seen you take this,” replied Charlotte, handing her the bowl of gruel with even broader bonhommie than before.

Julia Duffy reluctantly sat up among her blankets, conscious almost to agony of the squalor of all her surroundings, conscious even that the blankets were of the homespun, madder-dyed flannel such as the poor people use, and taking the gruel, she began to eat it in silence. She tried to prop herself in this emergency with the recollection that Charlotte Mullen’s grandfather drank her grandfather’s port wine under this very roof, and that it was by no fault of hers that she had sunk while Charlotte had risen, but the worn-out boots that lay on the floor where she had thrown them off, and the rags stuffed into the broken panes in the window, were facts that crowded out all consolation from bygone glories.

“Well, Miss Duffy,” said Charlotte, drawing up a chair to the bedside, and looking at her hostess with a critical eye, “I’m sorry to see you so sick; when Billy Grainey left the milk last night he told Norry you were laid up in bed, and I thought I’d come over and see if there was anything I could do for you.”

“Thank ye, Miss Mullen,” replied Julia stiffly, sipping the nauseous gruel with ladylike decorum, “I have all I require here.”

“Well, ye know, Miss Duffy, I wanted to see how you are,” said Charlotte, slightly varying her attack; “I’m a bit of a doctor, like yourself. Peggy Roche below told me you had what she called ‘an impression on the heart,’ but it looks to me more like a touch of liver.”

The invalid does not exist who can resist a discussion of symptoms, and Miss Duffy’s hauteur slowly thawed before Charlotte’s intelligent and intimate questions. In a very short time Miss Mullen had felt her pulse, inspected her tongue, promised to send her a bottle of unfailing efficacy, and delivered an exordium on the nature and treatment of her complaint.

“But in deed and in truth,” she wound up, “if you want my opinion, I’ll tell you frankly that what ails you is you’re just rotting away with the damp and loneliness of this place. I declare that sometimes when I’m lying awake in my bed at nights, I’ve thought of you out here by yourself, without an earthly creature near you if you got sick, and wondered at you. Why, my heavenly powers! ye might die a hundred deaths before