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“How does Nellie take it?”

The sorely tried Mrs. Biff grinned. “‘Tis that keeps me from quite sinking; she is most dretful horrified and vowing she’s going to leave.”

However, Nellie did not go; it was the castaway whom they had succored who awoke in her right mind before any one was stirring the next morning, clothed herself, for lack of her own rags (which were airing in the back yard), in a decent brown dress, cloak and hat of the doctor’s from the guest-room closet, put on the doctor’s large, serviceable boots, and gathering the loose silver and three one-dollar banknotes left in Katy’s cash box, otherwise her “cup” from the pantry shelf, departed into the unknown nether world from whence she came.

“And a mercy she didn’t murder us in our beds!” opined Nellie; “maybe she will yet!”

Nellie’s prophecy appeared less grotesque the following week when her young man, Phil, by Christian name–I did not come to know his surname–discovered at the police station or the engine house (he frequenting both places in his wealth of leisure) that the castaway had escaped from a quarantined house full of smallpox, in a little hamlet near by. Here was a situation! Nellie vowed she wouldn’t sleep a wink were she Mrs. Kane or Amos, particularly Amos, because colored folk took naturally to smallpox.

Amos only grinned; but Mrs. Kane was palpably nervous and began inquiring into symptoms of what Nellie termed “the dread disease.”

Presently she was feeling them faithfully. And Katy shrugged the shoulder of scorn. But scorn turned into consternation by Monday, for an agitated neighbor came to the front door to announce that Mrs. Kane was sick in bed with an awful fever and broke out terrible, and would the doctor please step over there.

“And all the clothes in the suds!” sighed Katy. “But that’s nothing. Poor Miss Mercy! she’s almost out of her mind; she says that she’s to blame; she’s brought smallpox on that innocent woman, and most like she’ll die; and if she hadn’t been so wicked and headstrong and had listened to her friend (she didn’t name nobody, but I know she means young Gordon) and her sister, it wouldn’t have happened; she hadn’t even helped the woman who fetched the smallpox; she’d only tempted her to crime! And what should she say to poor Mrs. Bateman? Nobody wanted to rent her home to be a pest-house. And she’d set the house afire by hiring an ignorant man–Oh, she was a wicked girl! Her aunty often told her she was a fool, and oh, why hadn’t she believed her and not tried to do things too big for her senseless head? And she’s been fairly crying her eyes out. The poor, sweet, humble-minded little thing!”

Poor little Mercy! But I was to pity her much more during the succeeding ten minutes. Amos came out to the barberry hedge to tell our cook that Miss Mercy was in bed and he ‘lowed she’d smallpox. He was off in pursuit of the doctor, who was at Mrs. Kane’s who’d got a fearful bad case. Hardly was Amos out of sight than Nellie, in her cheap imitation of the latest fashion of big hat, dashed out of the gate after the street car. So do rats desert the sinking ship, I thought. Straightway I went over to the house. Katy herself answered the bell. She was in two minds about ejecting me by force, but she softened when I recalled to her how recently I had been vaccinated.

“Well, Miss Patsy, that’s so,” she admitted, “and besides, I ain’t absolutely sure ’tis smallpox. But she’d a kinder chill and I wouldn’t let her come down-stairs. Say, you don’t happen to have seen Nellie anywhere?”

When I told her, she drew a long sigh. We were standing at the side door, where a great Norway fir shakes its blue-green shadows.