Agnes liked Maria Maroni. Maria was very bright and forward in her studies and was a pretty Italian girl, as well. The Maronis lived much better than they once had, too. They now occupied one of the upstairs tenements over Mrs. Kranz’s delicatessen store, instead of all living in the basement.
The boy who ran into the Kenway yard and told Agnes this while she was tying up the gladioli stems after a particularly hard night’s rain, did not seem to be an Italian. Indeed, he was no boy that Agnes ever remembered having seen before.
But tenants were changing all the time over there where Maria lived. This might be a new boy in that neighborhood. And, anyway, Agnes was not bothered in her mind much about the boy. It was Maria’s illness that troubled her.
“What is the matter with the poor girl?” Agnes wanted to know. “What does the doctor say it is?”
“They ain’t got no doc,” said the boy. “She’s just sick, Maria is. I don’t know what she’s got besides.”
This sounded bad enough to Agnes. And the fact that the sick girl had no medical attention was the greater urge for the Kenway girl to do something about it. Of course, Joe and his wife must have a doctor for Maria at once.
Agnes went into the house and told Mrs. McCall about it. She even borrowed the green and yellow basket from the little girls and packed some jelly and a bowl of broth and other nice things to take to Maria Maroni. The Kenways seldom went to the tenements empty-handed.
She would have taken Neale with her, only she felt that after their incipient “quarrel” of the previous morning she did not care immediately to make up with the boy. Sometimes she felt that Neale O’Neil took advantage of her easy disposition.
So Agnes went off alone with her basket. Half an hour later a boy rang the front door bell of the Corner House. He had a note for Mrs. McCall. It was written in blue pencil, and while the housekeeper was finding her reading glasses the messenger ran away so that she could not question him.
The note purported to be from Hedden, Mr. Howbridge’s butler. It said that the lawyer had been “brought home” and had asked for Mrs. McCall to be sent for. It urged expedition in her answer to the request, and it threw Mrs. McCall into “quite a flutter” as she told Linda and Aunt Sarah Maltby.