“Who are you? What do you want here with a veil on that nobody can see through? Go away,” said a sharp, angry voice.
“You told me to come!” said the woman, lifting her veil and bending forward that her features might be seen.
“Not at this time of night,” cried the voice, which now exhibited a slightly foreign accent; and, without having really seen the face presented for her inspection, the woman who owned it was about to close the door entirely.
“You don’t know me. I came from Bellevue,” said the nurse; “you told me to come, and I’m here.”
“Bellevue, Bellevue. Oh! and in the night. Come in; has anything happened? anybody dead, eh?”
The door was flung open more generously, and the visitor half pulled, half invited through.
CHAPTER IV.
MADAME DE MARKE.
The room in which Jane Kelly found herself was almost in darkness. Some smouldering embers sent faint red gleams from an open fireplace, over which a strip of coarse bagging had been nailed to keep in the smoke, and by this she could only discover that a poverty-stricken look pervaded everything around her. A small weird-like woman stood but half revealed by the light, gazing sharply upon her. Spite of the darkness, she felt that two keen black eyes were piercing her through and through.
All at once the woman stooped, and taking a handful of shavings from an old candle-box that stood on the hearth, flung them upon the embers.
A burst of light revealed a smoke-begrimed room, a tattered old bed, some broken chairs tied together with coarse twine, and a rickety table. The sudden light was greeted by a hoarse croaking which came from the direction of the bed; but the flash was so transient that these things left little impression on the girl’s mind, which fastened entirely on the woman herself. Lean, spare, pinched in all her features, grim, unwashed, witch-like, the owner of that room stood in its midst, with the sudden radiance full upon her one minute, and the next she was lost in shadows—all but the eyes, which were still peering into Jane Kelly’s face.