“Is that her room immediately above the porch?”

“Yes, that’s it.”

“There’s a light in the window.”

“And I suppose you want me to see if anything’s the matter?”

“Just find out if she sent for me, that’s all. You see, somebody sent for me.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time they’ve hoaxed a doctor,” she retorted, as she shuffled along in her slippers and began to climb the stairs. David remained in the dark hallway, trying to recall her name — ah yes, she was Mrs. Patterson; her husband had been Joe Patterson — worked at the brewery — diabetic — died of it — one of Cowell’s patients. A doctor remembers things that way. He could hear the creak of the joists as Mrs. Patterson walked over them, the sound of a door opening; he could smell stale cooking and stuffy rooms. He had waited in so many houses, had climbed so many stairs to so many bedrooms, that his nerves as well as his ears and eyes and nostrils had acquired a curious sensitivity to the atmosphere of an interior; and now, waiting in that small lodging house in Harcourt Row, awareness came to him of something strange and unusual. He had no time to wonder what it was, or even whether it had any existence outside his own mood; for Mrs. Patterson creaked her way down the stairs carrying a lighted candle.

“You’d better come up and see her. I can’t understand a word she says — she’s foreign. She’s hurt her arm, by the look of it.”

“All right.”

He followed upstairs, till the woman opened the door of a very small room, crowded with shabby furniture and lit by a single unshaded gas light. A bed occupied most of the space, and on this sat a girl. David saw her face first of all through a wall mirror that happened to be in line with it; stained with grease paint, it struck him disturbingly, so that he stared for a moment, hardly realizing that the eyes he met in the glass could really be seeing him also.

They were amber-brown, curiously matched with reddish-tinted hair; matched, too, in their pained, difficult eagerness, with the set of lips and mouth. David went to her. He saw at once that her left wrist, resting over her knee as she sat, hung limply. She did not speak, but pointed to it, and when he stooped and held it, feeling what was amiss, her lips parted and blood came rushing into the marks that her teeth had made.

“It is broken?” she said.

“I’m afraid so,” he answered simply, kneeling to open his bag on a chair. He noticed then that a piece of stocking stuck to her leg in a smear of blood and dirt; nothing much, but the kind of thing he was always careful about. After bandaging the wrist he set about to clean this cut and asked Mrs. Patterson for warm water.

“You’re going to have to rest for a while,” he said to the girl. She nodded, but he was not sure that she knew what he meant.