One day he goes a long way with one of the servants—so far that he becomes homesick and cries for his mother. The servant takes him into a house; they sit in a dark kitchen near a green water-butt. He thinks he will never see his home again. But they still go on, past ships and barges, past a gloomy brick house with long high walls behind which prisoners sit. He sees a new church, a new alley lined with trees, a dusty high-road along whose edges dandelions grow. Now the servant carries him. At last they come to a great stone building hard by which is a yellow wooden house with a cross, surrounded by a large garden. They see limping, mournful-looking people dressed in white. They reach a great hall where are nothing but beds painted brown, with old women in them. The walls are whitewashed, the old women are white, and the beds are white. There is a very bad smell. They pass by a row of beds, and in the middle of the room stop at a bed on the right side. In it lies a woman younger than the rest with black curly hair confined by a night-cap. She lies half on her back; her face is emaciated, and she wears a white cloth over her head and ears. Her thin hands are wrapped up in white bandages and her arms shake ceaselessly so that her knuckles knock against each other. When she sees the child, her arms and knees tremble violently, and she bursts into tears. She kisses his head, but the boy does not feel comfortable. He is shy, and not far from crying himself. "Don't you know Christina again?" she says; but he does not. Then she dries her eyes and describes her sufferings to the servant, who is taking eatables out of a basket.

The old women in white now begin to talk in an undertone, and Christina begs the servant not to show what she has in the basket, for they are so envious. Accordingly the servant pushes surreptitiously a yellow rix-dollar into the psalm-book on the table. The child finds the whole thing tedious. His heart says nothing to him; it does not tell him that he has drunk this woman's milk, which really belonged to another; it does not tell him that he had slept his best sleep on that shrunken bosom, that those shaking arms had cradled, carried, and dandled him; his heart says nothing, for the heart is only a muscle, which pumps blood indifferent as to the source it springs from. But after receiving her last fervent kisses, after bowing to the old women and the nurse, and breathing freely in the courtyard after inhaling the close air of the sick-ward, he becomes somehow conscious of a debt, which can only be paid by perpetual gratitude, a few eatables, and a rix-dollar slipped into a psalm-book, and he feels ashamed at being glad to get away from the brown-painted beds of the sufferers.