In that part of New York where the narrow streets begin to twist, there is a quarter called Greenwich Village.
Painters live there: the houses are of old brick, the windows face north, and the rent is just as much as a young artist can pay.
Sue and Johnsy shared a studio there, at the top of a third-floor house.
In November a cold, invisible stranger crept through the quarter; the doctors called it pneumonia, and it swept along the narrow streets.
Johnsy fell ill. She was thin as a blade of grass, and the illness dealt with her easily.
Sue called the doctor, and the doctor looked at the girl and then drew Sue out into the hall.
“Half of it is medicine,” he said. “The other half is whether she wants to live. If the patient is already counting the funeral, there is nothing I can do.”
Sue went back into the room, where the sick Johnsy lay turned towards the window, looking at the old ivy vine outside it.
She was counting the leaves, backwards.
“Twelve,” she said quietly. “Eleven. Now ten.”
Sue asked her what she was counting. Johnsy did not look at her.
“When the last leaf falls, I will go too,” she said. “I have seen it happen before.”
Sue told her that was nonsense, and that she should sleep. Then she sat down by the window and cried, because there was nothing she could do.
On the ground floor of the house lived Mr. Behrman, an old painter who had held a brush for forty years and had still not painted the masterpiece he talked about every evening.
Behrman was surly and he drank, but he loved the two girls as if they were his own children.
Sue went down to him and told him what was happening to Johnsy. The old painter grew angry.
“What nonsense!” he shouted. “To die because a leaf falls? What stupidity!”
But his eyes were wet, and he went upstairs with her to look at the sick girl.
That night a storm came: rain beat on the window, and the wind blew as if something meant to carry the house away.
In the morning Johnsy woke and asked her to pull up the blind.
On the wall outside, one single leaf remained. It hung there, wet and dark green, and it did not move.
Johnsy looked at it for a while and then said: it will fall tonight, and then I will die.
But it did not fall that evening, nor the next day, and on the third day Johnsy asked for food.
The doctor told Sue that the patient was out of danger: half of it was medicine, and the other half was wanting to live.
Sue asked the doctor about the old painter as well. The doctor shook his head.
Mr. Behrman had been taken to hospital with pneumonia two days earlier, and there was nothing more to be done.
That afternoon Sue told Johnsy that Mr. Behrman had died. In the storm that night he had gone out of the house and done something.
“They found a lamp, a ladder and some brushes with him,” said Sue. “And that leaf is there on the wall.”
From the room where the sick girl lay, through the window, the wall could be seen: the last leaf was there, dark green, with the marks of the storm on it.
Johnsy looked at it for a long time. “He painted it,” she said at last.
Sue said nothing. They stood at the window and looked at the wall, where the leaf did not move in the wind.
“It is his masterpiece,” said Sue quietly.
Johnsy did not answer. Outside, every other leaf had fallen; only the one somebody had painted on the wall at night was left.
That evening Johnsy ate, and the next day she was sitting up in bed.
