"Oh, no!" she protested, with a vehemence that surprised him. "I am
strong. Oh, thank you, sir,--but I can go alone. It's Dicky--my little
boy. I've never left him so long. I had gone for the medicine and I saw
the church. I used to go to church, sir, before we had our troubles--and
I just went in. It suddenly came over me that God might help me--the
doctor can do nothing."

"I will go with you," he said.

She ceased to resist, as one submitting to the fatality of a superior
will.

The pavements that afternoon, as Hodder and the forlorn woman left the
cool porticoes of St. John's, were like the floor of a stone oven, and
the work horses wore little bonnets over their heads. Keeping to the
shady side, the rector and his companion crossed Tower Street with its
trolley cars and its awninged stores, and came to that depressing
district which had reproached him since the first Sunday of his ministry
when he had traversed it with Eldon Parr. They passed the once
prosperous houses, the corner saloons pandering to two vices, decked with
the flamboyant signs of the breweries. The trees were dying along the
asphalt and in the yards, the iron fences broken here and there, the
copings stained with rust and soot. Hodder's thoughts might have been
likened to the heated air that simmered above the bricks.

They were in Dalton Street! She seemed to have forgotten his presence,
her pace quickened as she turned into a gate and flew up a flight of
dirty stone steps, broken and sagging. Hodder took in, subconsciously,
that the house was a dingy grey, of three stories and a Mansard roof,
with a bay window on the yard side, and a fly-blown sign, "Rooms to Rent"