"You must be mistaken," said Mrs. Arnold. "Harry was ill at home all that day."
CHAPTER XXXI.
MATER DOLOROSA.
Honora Riley, who washed for Mrs. Barlow, lived in a ramshackle, desolate district of the city which was appropriately known as "the Barrens." Colliers, sooty to the eyerims, trudging home; ashy dump-pickers; women cowled in drab shawls from beneath whose folds peeped pitchers brimmed with foam like the whipped surface of the milk pail, but the liquor was not milk; such were the sights Emily noticed when she called at Mrs. Riley's to inquire whether it was a spell of illness that had prevented her from coming to wash that Monday.
"Come in," a feeble voice answered her knock. "Oh, is it you, Miss Barlow?"
Emily saw that the supper on the table, laid for two, was untasted, and that the eyes of the woman who sat on the chair clasping her knees before her, were red.
"We thought you might be ill, Mrs. Riley," she said.
"It is heartsick I am, and too broken-hearted to work, dear. Land knows I have good reason or I wouldn't fail your mother."
"It isn't the pneumonia again, I hope."