"Thank you, Mrs. Brown. If you could spare a little time I should be glad, for you know how to do everything, mother says."
"Very well. You run back to your mother, and I will soon follow." And Mrs. Brown said "Good night" to her other neighbour, and was turning indoors when Mrs. Satchell stopped her.
"Look here, Mrs. Brown," she said, "you don't know what you're doing, lending sheets and helping them. I know Jessie and her mother too. And—"
"Yes; they are your friends," said Mrs. Brown, rather shortly; and once more saying "Good night," she went and told Minnie, who had just gone to bed, that she must lie awake until her father came home, and then tell him that she had gone to help Jessie Collins make her mother comfortable. "Father has got the key, and can let himself in, and so you need not get up," added her mother, as she took a clean apron out of the drawer, and also a clean pillow-case, which she thought Jessie might have forgotten to ask for.
She had never been inside Jessie's home before, and the sight of the dirty, close-smelling room she passed through on her way upstairs made her feel sick.
"It isn't cold to-night," she said, as she went up the stairs; "and if you were to set this downstairs window open it would make the bedroom fresher."
"All right," answered Jessie; and she dashed down again and sent the window up with a bang.
The bedroom was worse than Mrs. Brown had imagined. The sick woman had lain down in her clothes on the unmade bed, and now lay moaning, half unconscious of her surroundings.
"Doctor said she was to be quiet, so I wouldn't let any of 'em come up to her," said Jessie, by way of explaining matters.
Mrs. Brown scarcely knew where to begin the task of making things comfortable, but at last, with Jessie's help, she began to arrange the unoccupied side of the bed, rolling up the sheets, ready to pass under the invalid when they had made her ready to move.