In the garret room, old Sally, the dying inmate lies in a coma. The impatient matron is just about to leave when the sick woman sits up and asks that the two attendants withdraw. The rapidly failing patient begins her incoherent story: In this same room years ago, she nursed a pretty young woman who bore a child and died. But before dying, the mother entrusted a gold object to her attendant. However, the narrator confesses, she stole the article, although she realized that the boy would have been better treated "if they had known it all!" In her final moments, the girl expressed the hope that if her child survived it might one day have reason not to be ashamed of its mother.
The speaker's last words are: "They called him Oliver. . . . The gold I stole was — ." Death again guards the secrets of the living. The matron walks out nonchalantly, remarking that there was nothing to reveal after all.
