Anthony looked about at the piteous horror of the place.
"I wonder," he said, "that you have been able to do anything. It seems beyond human help."
During the last few weeks, while he was working himself deeper and deeper into the rotting heart of the plague, he caught the flitting of another, on ahead of him, who was giving of strength and spirit, and who was followed by blessings. Then the name came to him, back along the way she had gone, and a comfort had soothed him, an exaltation had stirred his heart. Then one night they met in a place of death, and he had marveled at the courage in her face, the readiness of her hands. A second time he met her, again in the night, and heard her plead with the brutal drivers of the death-carts for reverence for the dead; once in the potter's-field he had taken the spade from her hands, and finished the shallow grave she had been digging for a dead child.
And now, as he stood talking with her in the pest-house, there arose a voice.
"In the garret, my dear sons," it said. "I must lie in the garret; that is the place I like best."
A bent, withered old woman, whom Anthony had noted prowling among the sick, muttering and chuckling, paused beside the man's bed; her long, discolored teeth showed in a kind of horrid glee as she looked down at him.
"So you'd like the garret, would you, my gentleman?" she said. "The garret of that little place which you have kept so close all these years? So would I. I'd like to lie there, too. God's truth, I would. It'd be a rare place to ransack; I'd love, sir, to go about in it."
The man tried to arise; but he could not.
"Where is Rehoboam? Where is Nathaniel?" he asked. "Where are my sons?"
The old woman cackled.