We had not gone far, and were still in the centre of the city, when a handsome open carriage drove by us, and as it passed, there sat in it the young lady I had seen on the train, with a pleasant looking elderly man, whom I conjectured to be her father, and who appeared in a very good-humor with her or himself. As I was gazing at them, her eyes fell full into mine, and after a half-moment's mystification, she recognized me as I lifted my hat, and her face lit up with a pleasant smile of recognition. I found my feelings divided between pleasure at her sweet return of my bow and chagrin that she should find me in such a predicament; for I knew what a ridiculous figure I must cut with the dog between my feet and a frowsy child, thickly smeared with jam, in my arms. In fact, I could see that the girl was talking and laughing spiritedly with her father, evidently about us. I confess to a feeling of shame at the figure I must cut, and I wondered if she would not think I had lied to her in saying that I had never met them before. I did not know that the smile had been for Dix.
When we reached, after a good hour's drive, the little street for which we were bound, I found my forecast fairly correct. The dingy little house, on which was the rusted number given Mrs. McNeil in her husband's letter, was shut up and bore no evidence of having been opened, except a small flower-pot with a sprig of green in it in a dusty, shutterless window. It was the sort of house that is a stove in summer and an ice-box in the winter. And there was a whole street of them. After we had knocked several times and I had tried to peep over the fence at the end of the street, the door of an adjoining tenement opened, and a slatternly, middle-aged woman peeped out.
"Are you Mrs. McNeil?" she asked.
"Yes."
"Well, here's your key. Your man told me to tell you 't if you came while he was at work, you'd find something to eat in the back room 't he'd cooked this mornin' before he went to work. The train was late, he said, and he couldn't wait; but he'd be home to-night, and he'd bring some coal when he came. What a fine lot o' children you have. They ought to keep you in cinders and wood. I wish I had some as big as that; but mine are all little. My two eldest died of scarlet fever two years ago. Drainage, they said."
She had come out and unlocked the door and was now turning away.
"I think your man had someone to take the up-stairs front room; but he didn't come—you'll have to get someone to do it and you double up. The Argand Estate charges such rent, we all have to do that. Well, if I can help you, I'm right here."
I was struck by her kindness to the forlorn stranger, and the latter's touching recognition of it, expressed more in looks and in tone than in words.
Having helped them into the house, which was substantially empty, only one room having even a pretence of furniture in it, and that merely a bed, a mattress and a broken stove, I gave the poor woman a little of my slender stock of money and left her murmuring her thanks and assurances that I had already done too much for them. In fact, I had done nothing.