"I wrote--I wrote--they gimme a stamp--I wrote--how--Where is she?" "A cousin had called ye sudden-like for sickness was how she put it. Faith and me niver once a-smellin' the mice, the way she lay there, waitin', waitin' day after day, doubled up in the joints and waitin' for thim ten days to pass--" "O God!" "I found her in bed yisterday, a-clutchin' the letter, or niver to my own dyin' would I have known the shameful truth of it. It's screw open her poor hands I had to, for the readin' of the letter that had been eatin' 'er for all them days of waitin'. Ye hussy! Ye jailbird--and me niver thinkin' but what it was the sick cousin! Me niver smellin' the mice! Your own girl friend, neither. Ye hussy! Jailbird!" "Oh! Oh! Oh!" "It's only because she was sainted I'm lettin' ye up in on her. She layin' up there, waitin'. Strangers that crossed her poor hands on her poor breast and strangers that laid her out. Niver even a priest called in on her. She a-layin' up there, waitin'--the Lord have mercy on your soul! If ye ain't afraid before the Lord to look on her, come up. It's thankin' God I am she can't open her eyes to see ye." Hands clutching her throat, Miss Schump remained standing there on the sun-drenched steps, gazing after the figure receding into the musty gloom of the hallway. She wanted to follow, but instead could only stand there, repeating and repeating: "O my God! O my God! God! God! What have I done? What have I done? Mamma--mamma--mamma! O my God! What? What--" * * * * * In the pyramidal plot-structure of this story the line of descent is by far the sheerer. Short-story correspondence-schools would call it the brief downward action leading to denouement. With Stella Schump it was almost a straight declivity. There were days of the black kind of inertia when to lift the head from its sullen inclination to rest chin on chest was not to be endured. There was actually something sick in the eyes, little cataracts of gray cloud seeming to float across. She would sit hunched and looking out of them so long and so unseeingly that her very stare seemed to sleep. She had removed the stick or two that remained unsold to a little rear room high up in a large, damp-smelling lodging-house on West Twentieth Street, within view of a shipping-pier. There was a sign inserted in the lower front window: ROOMS. LIGHT HOUSEKEEPING. INQUIRE WITHIN.