The figure of a woman approached him.
“Oh, sir,” she said, checking her sobs, “have you the key, and can you let me in?”
“Yes, I have a key. Do you live here?”
“No, sir, but I’m sister to Mrs. Hallifield. Perhaps you know Hallifield, the tram conductor. I came to see him to-night because he was taken so ill, but I got hindered setting out again, and didn’t allow time to get back to Macdougal’s. I’m in his shop, and the rule at his boarding-house is that the door is closed at eleven and mayn’t be opened any more, and when I got there sir, being hindered with the fog, it was five minutes past.”
“And they wouldn’t let you in?” asked Frithiof. “What an abominable thing—the man ought to be ashamed of himself for having such a rule! Come in; why you must be half-frozen! I know your sister quite well!”
“I can never thank you enough,” said the poor girl. “I thought I should have had to stay out all night! There’s a light, I see, in the window; my brother-in-law is worse, I expect.”
“What is wrong with him?” asked Frithiof.
“Oh, he’s been failing this long time,” said the girl; “it’s the long hours of the trams he’s dying of. There’s never any rest for them you see, sir; winter and summer, Sunday and week-day they have to drudge on. He’s a kind husband and a good father too, and he will go on working for the sake of keeping the home together, but it’s little of the home he sees when he has to be away from it sixteen hours every day. They say they’re going to give more holidays and shorter hours, but there’s a long time spent in talking of things, it seems to me, and in the meanwhile John’s dying.”
Frithiof remembered how Sigrid had mentioned this very thing to him in the summer when he had told her of his disgrace; he had been too full of his own affairs to heed her much, but now his heart grew hot at the thought of this pitiable waste of human life, this grinding out of a larger dividend at the cost of such terrible suffering. It was a sign that his new life had actually begun when, instead of merely railing at the injustice of the world, he began to think what he himself could do in this matter.
“Perhaps they will want the doctor fetched. I will come with you to the door and you shall just see,” he said.