chair down here to offer you," she continued.
"But if you prefer your own thoughts to my chatter, I will sit down on
the bottom step here and keep silent."

Miss Haldin hastened to assure her that, on the contrary, she was very
much interested in the story of the journeyman lithographer. He was a
revolutionist, of course.

"A martyr, a simple man," said the _dame de compangnie_, with a faint
sigh, and gazing through the open front door dreamily. She turned her
misty brown eyes on Miss Haldin.

"I lived with him for four months. It was like a nightmare."

As Miss Haldin looked at her inquisitively she began to describe the
emaciated face of the man, his fleshless limbs, his destitution.
The room into which the apple-woman had led her was a tiny garret, a
miserable den under the roof of a sordid house. The plaster fallen off
the walls covered the floor, and when the door was opened a horrible
tapestry of black cobwebs waved in the draught. He had been liberated a
few days before--flung out of prison into the streets. And Miss Haldin
seemed to see for the first time, a name and a face upon the body of
that suffering people whose hard fate had been the subject of so many
conversations, between her and her brother, in the garden of their
country house.

He had been arrested with scores and scores of other people in that
affair of the lithographed temperance tracts. Unluckily, having got hold
of a great many suspected persons, the police thought they could extract
from some of them other information relating to the revolutionist
propaganda.

"They beat him so cruelly in the course of investigation," went on the
_dame de compagnie_, "that they injured him internally. When they had
done with him he was doomed. He could do nothing for himself. I beheld
him lying on a wooden bedstead without any bedding, with his head on a
bundle of dirty rags, lent to him out of charity by an old rag-picker,
who happened to live in the basement of the house. There he was,
uncovered, burning with fever, and there was not even a jug in the
room for the water to quench his thirst with. There was nothing
whatever--just that bedstead and the bare floor."

"Was there no one in all that great town amongst the liberals and
revolutionaries, to extend a helping hand to a brother?" asked Miss
Haldin indignantly.

"Yes. But you do not know the most terrible part of that man's misery.
Listen. It seems that they ill-used him so atrociously that, at