. "We shall go for two
blessed weeks and forget this place with its wretched tangles."

"I'm your man!" he said, rising and taking her hand with his old boyish
enthusiasm. "Can we start early?"

She kept her hand in his while she laughed again. "The train goes from
the Grand Central at one. I'll wire Aunt Joyce."

Outside Ewing met Bartell, but he did not talk of the San Juan.

"You must see to your sister," he said. "She looks the way my father
did. You ought to get her out of here. She's going off for two weeks,
but that won't set her right. Go look at her!"

Bartell found his sister where Ewing had left her.

"Well, Nell, how is it now? What did Birley say?"

She stirred impatiently in her chair. "He wouldn't commit himself. He
told me to rest away from here for two weeks and then come back to see a
specialist he'd send me to, a man who knows--such things."

"I just met Ewing--he spoke of how badly you look. I'm worried, Nell.
You're not going to be left here."

"I must tell you something, dear--oh, a ghastly joke, if ever there was
one: You know that one death trap of a tenement I've had so much trouble
with----"

"Where all those consumptives were? Yes."

"They've died there like sheep. I had it inspected--I wanted to have the
owner compelled to build it over or something, but we always found that
the law had been cunningly met with--not the spirit of it, but the
letter. The airshafts and drains were bad enough to kill, but not bad
enough to hurt the owner. Yesterday I determined to find out who the
owner was, to make a personal appeal. I was willing to buy the place
myself."

She stopped in a fit of coughing, a dry, hard, tearing cough that left
her exhausted.

"Well, Sis?"

"I went to the agents--this will make you cry or laugh; I did both--and
I found they were my agents--the house was my house."

"Poor Sis!"

"One of those Dick left--_mine_, you understand. I've been spending the
blood of those people, eating, wearing, amusing myself with it."

"Yes, and going down there to get caught in the same trap. I don't see
anything funny about that."

"Alden Teevan would. I must tell him of it--my own dungeon closing in on
me."

"Nonsense! You're morbid, girl. Tenements have got to be dirty. Trinity
Church itself has a fine bunch of the worst kind."

"I'm not a church, dear. This tenement is coming down. I gave orders
to-day."

"Well, you stay away from it. You're in bad shape, my girl."

"