Nance wiped away the tears that trickled down the wrinkled cheeks, and
tried to quiet her, but the rising fever made her talk on and on.

"I ain't laid eyes on her since a year ago this fall. She come home sick,
an' nobody knew it but me. I got out of her whut was her trouble, an' I
went to see his mother, but it never done no good. Then I went to the
bottle factory an' tried to get his father to listen--"

"Whose father?" asked Nance, sharply.

"The Clarke boy's. It was him that did fer her. I tell you she was a good
girl 'til then. But they wouldn't believe it. They give me some money to
sign the paper an' not to tell; but before God it's him that's the father
of her child, and poor Dan--"

But Mrs. Smelts never finished her sentence; a violent paroxysm of pain
seized her, and at dawn the messenger that called for the patient on the
third floor, following the usual economy practised in Calvary Alley, made
one trip serve two purposes and took her also.

By the end of the month the epidemic was routed, and the alley, cleansed
and chastened as it had never been before, was restored to its own. Mr.
Snawdor, Fidy Yager, Mrs. Smelts, and a dozen others, being the unfittest
to survive, had paid the price of enlightenment.




CHAPTER XXIX