But she found time to go the next day, and the first sight of Nan's sweet face was enough to make her as deeply interested in the two as her nephew had long been.
"But what an uncomfortable place for a sick girl!" Mrs. Rawson thought, as she glanced at the shutterless windows through which the sun was pouring, making the small room almost unbearably hot, although there was no fire in the stove. She noticed that the place was daintily clean and neat, though bare as it well could be, but noisy children were racing up and down the stairways and shouting through the halls, making quiet rest impossible. Mrs. Rawson's kind heart ached as she looked from the room to the pure face of the girl lying there with the little child beside her.
"She must be a very unusual girl to look like that after living for months in this place," she thought to herself.
While she was there the doctor came, and when he went away, Mrs. Rawson went with him that she might tell him what she knew about the girl's life and learn what he thought of the case.
"It is a plain case of overwork," he said. "From what you tell me the girl has been doing twice as much as she was able to do, and living in that little oven of a room with nothing like the fresh air and exercise she should have had, and very likely not half enough to eat. The baby seems extremely delicate. Probably it won't live through the summer, and a good thing too if there's no one but the girl to provide for them. What they need is--to go straight away into the country and stay there all summer, or better yet, for a year or two, but I suppose that is out of the question."
"I must see what can be done, doctor. Such a girl as that surely ought not to be left to struggle along unfriended."
"No, but there are so many such cases. Well, I hope something can be done for her. I'll call and see her again to-morrow, but medicine is of little use in a case like this," the doctor replied.
Mrs. Rawson was not one to "let the grass grow under her feet," when she had anything to do, and she felt that she had something to do in this case. She thought it over as she went home, and before night she had written to a relative in the country--a woman who had a big farm and a big heart--to ask if she would board Nan and her little brother for the summer. She described the two, and told how bravely the girl had battled with poverty and misfortune until her strength had failed. The letter went straight from the warm heart of the writer to that of her friend and the response was prompt.
"Send those two children right to me, and if rest and pure air and plenty of wholesome food are what they need, please God, they shall soon be strong and well. They are surely His little ones, and you know I am always ready and glad to do His work."
Such was the message that Mrs. Rawson read to her nephew two days after her visit to Nan, and his face was full of satisfaction as he listened to it.