The girl looked at me appealingly and I said: “I’ll come this afternoon and see how you are.”

She gave me a piteous half-smile which seemed far too grateful for the little I had done. Joe talked about the incident all the way home.

“They just don’t look where they’re going. Out she darts … Tilburies, gigs, carts … and whiskies everywhere. I don’t know what gets into ‘em. They’re going to cross that road if it costs them their lives. Different from the open road, Miss Pleydell… going along at a spanking pace … and the horses’ hoofs ringing on the road.”

“Yes, it must be. I think she will be all right. I don’t think she was badly injured.”

“I thank me stars for that. I wouldn’t want a corpse on me conscience.

After all them years of good driving that wouldn’t be nice. But it would have been the young person’s own fault, though. “

“Poor girl! Perhaps she had something on her mind. She had a pleasant face.”

“You never know with them girls. Miss Pleydell. The pleasant-looking ones is often the worst.”

I found myself laughing at him and pulled myself up with a jerk. I did not laugh nowadays. There was no laughter left in life for me.

But I had to face the truth. It must be over an hour since the girl had fallen under the carriage and during that time I had not thought of Julian or my father. That poor girl’s misfortune had bought me an hour of forgetfulness.

I arrived at the house and let myself in. Polly came out and told me that it was almost lunchtime.

“I know,” I said.

“I’m later than I thought. We knocked a girl down in Oxford Street and took her to the hospital.”

“My sainted aunt!” cried Polly.

“Was she hurt bad?”

“I don’t think so. Very shocked, of course. They’ll find out in the hospital. I’m going to see her this afternoon.”

Both girls looked at me in dismay.

“You’re not going into one of them places, Miss?”

“The hospital, you mean? Yes, of course. I want to know about this girl. After all, it was my carriage which knocked her down.”

“She must have been where she shouldn’t have. Joe would never have run her down if she hadn’t been.”

“It was probably her fault, but that makes no difference. I shall go and see her. I feel a responsibility for her.”

“Oh Miss, you can’t go into a hospital.”

“Why not?”

“They’re not for the likes of you.”

I looked at them questioningly and they assumed the look which I was beginning to know well and which always amused me. It meant that I was an innocent and really did not know much about the ways of the wicked big city. They had been born and bred here; they were wiser than I they knew.

“Hospitals is terrible places, Miss,” said Jane.

“Of course. People there are sick or dying.”

“I’d rather be dead than go into one of them. Don’t you ever let me be took in, Poll… not if I’m at my last gasp.”

“I must go to visit this girl to see if she is all right.”

“Miss, only the lowest of the low is there,” said Polly.

“There was a time when Jane and me thought of taking it up … nursing, you know a profession, like. We’d looked after Ma for years and reckoned we was good at it. But them nurses … They’re drunk half the time .. lowest of the low, they are.”

“I am going to see this girl. Her name is Lily Craddock. I am going this afternoon and nothing is going to stop me.”

Jane lifted her shoulders.

“There’s some fish for lunch,” she said.

“It’s that fresh it’ll melt in your mouth.”

I sat down and they hovered over me serving me.

I was surprised that I could eat a little.

I shall never forget my visit to that hospital. As soon as I entered the place I was aware of the smell. I could not think what produced it. I only knew that it was nauseating. Later I knew it came from dirt and lack of sanitation.

I walked into a room where a large blowsy woman was sitting at a table. She looked half asleep.

I roused her and said: “I’ve come to visit Lily Craddock who was brought in this morning.”

She looked at me in surprise as though there was something very unusual about me.

She jerked her thumb over her shoulder towards a door. I walked to it, pushed it open and went into a room.

How right Jane and Polly were! It was a horrible sight. The room was with several windows, half of which were boarded up. That obnoxious smell was more apparent here than outside.

There were rows of beds about fifty or sixty of them, I calculated and so close together that there was hardly room to pass between them.

It was the people in the beds who shocked me most. They looked like corpses, some of them; at the best they were in stages of decay yellow-white faces, dirty, straggling hair, the bed linen discoloured, ingrained with grime and excrement. One or two of them raised themselves on their elbows to look at me; most of them were too close to death, I imagined, to take notice of anything.

I advanced into the room and said in a loud voice: “Is there a Miss Lily Craddock here?”

I had found her. She was at the far end of the room. I passed along the line of beds and went to her.

“Miss … it’s you!” I saw the joy in her face and I was glad.

“I never thought you’d come. “

“I said I would.” I looked at her and noticed that she was different from the others. Her face looked almost healthy in comparison.

I went on: “You can’t stay in this place. I’m going to take you away.”

She shook her head.

“Yes,” I said firmly.

“I am taking you home with me. I’m going to look after you until you have quite recovered.”

A kind of wonderment spread across her face.

A woman was approaching us. She appeared to be a person with some authority.

I said to her: “I have come to take this young woman away.”

“Oh?” she said, eyeing me rather insolently from head to foot.

“There can be no objection, I am sure. It was my carriage which ran her over. My carriage is now waiting outside for us. Bring her clothes, will you, please?”

“Who are you. Madam?” asked the woman, and I saw with delight and amusement that I had somehow managed to overawe her.

“I am Miss Pleydell, daughter of Colonel Pleydell of the War Office.

Now, let us get this girl’s clothes. If she is unfit to walk, she can be carried to the carriage. My coachman will help if necessary. “

“I … I can walk,” said Lily eagerly.

The woman called to another. She said: “This young woman’s leaving. We want all the beds we can get. It’s something to do with the War Office.”

I was laughing to myself as, when Lily was dressed she had been wearing her underclothes in the bed. I took her arm arid helped her to the door.

Joe was waiting to get us into the carriage.

I looked at the girl anxiously as we drove along.

“How are you feeling?” I asked.

“Better, thank you. Miss.”

“You wouldn’t have been better long if you had stayed in that place,” I said grimly.

And that was how Lily Craddock came into my life and it started to change from then on.

I had something to do. Every morning when I awoke the first thing I thought of was my patient. She had looked fairly healthy in that hospital but that was when she was compared with people on the point of death, and as soon as I had her under my care, I discovered that she was frail, undernourished, rather fearful of the world, desperately trying to earn enough money to keep herself alive.

The care other filled my days. I planned her meals; I tended her; I nursed her; and my pleasure in seeing her change under my eyes was worth all my efforts.

Once she said to me: “I reckon my good angel sent me under that carriage. I didn’t know there was people like you in the world. When I think of what you’ve done for me …”

I was deeply moved and I said to myself then: I don’t think it is anything much compared with what you are doing for me.

I was moving away from despair, from melancholy. I would never cease to mourn my dead, but I had been shown almost by a miracle that life was not entirely barren for me. There was something worthwhile that I could do.

Lily once said: “I feel better when you stroke my roreneau. It’s something about your hands, Miss Pleydell.”

I looked at them. Long, tapering fingers ‘artist’s fingers,” someone had once said. I had no skill in the arts unless one could call nursing an art.

I was haunted by those people in the hospital and the memory of the few nurses I had seen. They were unclean, blowsy and unkempt; they smelled of gin, and I was sure they neglected the sick and vulnerable.

That seemed terrible to me and I rejoiced that I had been able to take Lily away.

As for myself, I was eating more; tending Lily made me hungry. Special dishes were prepared for her, for Jane and Polly had thrown themselves wholeheartedly into the task of, as they said, ‘getting her on her feet’. I would sometimes be tempted yes, actually tempted to share those dishes and nothing could have pleased Jane and Polly more. They were nursing me back to health as well as Lily Craddock.

Sometimes the gloom would descend on me and I would think of my baby crying for me when I was not there, unable to breathe and no one there to care for him . and finally that doctor . that wicked doctor who had come to experiment on him. Perhaps he knew what he gave him would not save his life but he wanted to see the effect.

Somehow the neglect of those hospital patients became linked in my thoughts with that doctor. Those nurses cared only for themselves.