irl opens her eyes with a startled look,
and says, feebly:

"Do you think he will come?"

"Yes, dear, presently. He never fails."

The girl closed her eyes again, and there was silence. The dim rays of
the lamp, falling upon the doctor, revealed the figure of a woman of less
than medium size, perhaps of the age of thirty or more, a plain little
body, you would have said, who paid the slightest possible attention to
her dress, and when she went about the city was not to be distinguished
from a working-woman. Her friends, indeed, said that she had not the
least care for her personal appearance, and unless she was watched, she
was sure to go out in her shabbiest gown and most battered hat. She wore
tonight a brown ulster and a nondescript black bonnet drawn close down on
her head and tied with black strings. In her lap lay her leathern bag,
which she usually carried under her arm, that contained medicines, lint,
bandages, smelling-salts, a vial of ammonia, and so on; to her patients
it was a sort of conjurer's bag, out of which she could produce anything
that an emergency called for.

Dr. Leigh was not in the least nervous or excited. Indeed, an artist
would not have painted her as a rapt angelic visitant to this abode of
poverty. This contact with poverty and coming death was quite in her
ordinary experience. It would never have occurred to her that she was
doing anything unusual, any more than it would have occurred to the
objects of her ministrations to overwhelm her with thanks. They trusted
her, that was all. They met her always with a pleasant recognition.
She belonged perhaps to their world. Perhaps they would have said that
"Dr. Leigh don't handsome much," but their idea was that her face was
good. That was what anybody would have said who saw her tonight, "She
has such a good face;" the face of a woman who knew the world, and
perhaps was not very sanguine about it, had few illusions and few
antipathies, but accepted it, and tried in her humble way to alleviate
its hardships, without any consciousness of having a mission or making a
sacrifice.

Dr. Leigh--Miss Ruth Leigh--was Edith's friend. She had not come from
the country with an exalted notion of being a worker among the poor about
whom so much was written; she had not even descended from some high
circle in the city into this world, moved by a restless enthusiasm for
humanity. She was a woman of the people, to adopt a popular phrase.
From her childhood s