Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/205

 Pot and Pie until Bessie was able to return. It had long since become an accepted system.

The stranger not only became Bessie's problem; he took on the proportions of a crusade. She tended him carefully, rarely leaving his side save to buy food out of her almost invisible savings or to come down on the heads of others in the house who disturbed his rest by becoming noisy. She had in a cheap doctor and with the shrewdness of the poor she learned from him enough so that it was unnecessary to have him a second time. Her patient, she discovered, was suffering not only from drink but from starvation. She fed him up in splendid style and as he progressed toward recovery she experienced a new emotion—that of pride in the efficacy of her cure. She even thought for a time of giving up her way of life and becoming a nurse, but learning upon investigation that such a change implied complications and a good deal of tiresome training, she abandoned the idea.

It was not until the third week that she learned the name of the stranger. He had been well enough for some time to lie in bed watching her out of his dark eyes, but Bessie, feeling that it was indelicate to be curious about his name, did not mention the matter. She simply continued to address him as "You" and refer to him to the others in the house as im." She stood in awe of him, for her cockney shrewdness told her that he had come out of a world far above her, of which she knew nothing. The