Five years later Lily sat one Sunday morning in the same lodgings. The
poor old mother was gone, praying her with her last breath not to
desert the boy. But of Charley not a word had come to her--no news of
any kind.
She was quite alone--in those days she was generally alone; she had
kept her place at the post-office, but everybody knew of her trouble,
and somehow it made a kind of barrier between herself and her sister
clerks. The sorrows of love are sacred, but when they are mixed up
with a criminal and a prison there is a feeling--a kind of a
feeling--as if, well, one doesn't like somehow to be mixed up with it.
Lily was greatly to be pitied, no doubt; her lover had turned out
shameful; but she ought to have given up the man long before he got so
bad.
She was alone. The church bells were beginning to ring. She thought
she would go to church. While she considered this point, she heard a
woman's step on the stairs, and there was a knock at the door.
It was a nurse or probationer, dressed in the now familiar garb--a
young nurse.
"You are Lily Chesters?" she asked. "There is a patient just brought
in to the London Hospital who wants to see you. He is named Charley,
he says, and will give no other name. He wrote your address on paper.
'Tell her,' he said, 'that it is Charley.'"