For doctors meant hospitals, and the man below threatened to
sell his lodger's "sticks" if rent were not forthcoming. She cast her
eyes about in search of pawnable articles. They fell upon his clothes.
She took up his shirt and examined it carefully, appraising the sleeve
links and the studs. But when she touched the coat, the coat that had
Lucia's letter in the breast-pocket, Rickman turned in his bed and
made agonizing signs, struggling with the voice that perished in his
burning throat.

"Wot's the good," said she, "of a suit when yer can't wear it? As I
telled you wot you wa--No, the's no sorter use your making fyces at
me. And you keep your ----y legs in, or I'll--" The propositions that
followed were murmured in a hoarse but crooning tone such as a mother
might have used to soothe a fractious child. She went away, carrying
the clothes with her, and turned out the pockets in her den.

On her return she sent the man below to fetch the doctor. But the man
below fell in with boon companions on the way, and no doctor came. All
that night the woman watched by Rickman's bedside, heedless of her
luck. She kept life in him by feeding him with warm milk and gin, a
teaspoonful at a time. Rickman, aware of footsteps in the room,
fancied himself back again in Rankin's dressing-room. The whole scene
of that evening floated before him all night long. He had a sense of
presences hostile and offended, of being irretrievably disgraced. In
the recurring nightmare he saw Lucia Harden instead of Mrs. Rankin. So
persistently did he see her that when he woke he could not shake off
the impression that she had been actually, if unaccountably, present,
a spectator of his uttermost disgrace. He could never look her in the
face again. No, for he was disgraced; absolutely, irredeemably,
atrociously disgraced. Beyond all possibility of explanation and
defence; though he sometimes caught himself explaining and pleading
against those offended phantoms of his brain. Why should he suffer so?
Just because of his inability to deal with Rankin's never-ending
dinner, or to pay a debt of millions, many millions of figures that
climbed up the wall. He was not sure which of these two obligations
was laid upon him.

He became by turns delirious and drowsy, and the woman fetched a
doctor early the next day. He found enteric and blood-poisoning also,
of which Rickman's illness at the Rankins' must have been the first
warning symptoms.

"He'll have to