"Lotta!" said Sigrun in a low, trembling voice. "What is it?"
But there was no need for Lotta to answer. Sigrun knew as well as she did what the sickness was.
She knew, too, that it was risking death to touch the poor vagrant, yet she began resolutely stripping off her clothes, and while Lotta Hedman made the bed ready, spreading clean sheets, cool and smooth for the hot and tender skin. Sigrun gave her clean linen underclothes, and soon they had the groaning, shivering woman stretched on the bed.
And there they sat, full of pity for her, while she moaned and writhed in pain. Sigrun tried to give her water, but she seemed unable to swallow. Then the mistress turned again to Lotta, and the two sat hand in hand, silent and horrified at the power of the dreadful disease.
Soon they breathed more easily; the sick woman seemed to be quieter now, and suffering less.
And a little later, a short hour since she had first entered, she was perfectly calm and motionless. The uneven breathing stopped.
The two friends rose, laid the dead woman out where she lay, and crouched together as before, close to each other, as if petrified by the terrible dead face.
"A few days, and I shall look like that"—the same thought was in the minds of both. "Look like she does now. No one would recognize me. No one could say who it was."
"Who can she be?" asked Lotta in a whisper. And Sigrun answered in the same low voice that it must be some poor vagrant with no home to go to.
"Her clothes were not so very bad," she went on. "But sadly worn. Her boots are wet and trodden through; she has tramped a long way through the snow. The sickness must have come upon her on the road, and she has wandered about over the country in delirium. It must have been the light from our lamp that made her come here."