.

"Why don't you let me out?" he asked at last, sharply, with an effort.

The girl looked at him with yet a new expression on her mobile face--an
expression of desperation.

"Because I couldn't bear it any longer," she whispered. And as she spoke
her eyes wandered round the bare walls and rested for a moment on the
inner door. "Because when you've been all alone in the cold, without any
food, without any one to speak to for two days and two nights, you feel
you must speak to some one, whatever comes of it. If I'd had to wait out
there, listening, listening, for another night, I should have been mad,
raving mad in the morning."

"But I don't understand it at all," said Max, again inclining to belief
in the girl's story, impressed by her passionate earnestness. "Where has
your grandmother gone to? Why didn't she take you with her? Can't you
tell me the whole story?"

The girl looked at him curiously.

"Just now you only thought of getting away."

"I don't care to be detained by lock and key, certainly," said Max. "But
if you will unlock the door, I am quite ready to wait here until you
have unburdened your mind, if you want to do that."

She looked at him doubtfully.

"That's a promise, mind," said she at last. "And it's a promise you
wouldn't mind giving, I think, if you believed in half I've gone
through."

She took a key from her pocket, unlocked the outer door and set it ajar.

"Will that do for you?" asked she.

"Yes, that's all right."

She took up the candle, which she had put on a shelf while she knelt to
find out whether he was hurt, and crossing the brick floor with rapid,
rather stealthy steps, she put her fingers on the latch of the inner
door.

"Keep close!" whispered she.

Max obeyed. He kept so close that the girl's soft hair, which was of the
ash-fair color so common in English blondes who have been flaxen-headed
in their childhood, almost touched his face. She opened the door and
entered what was evidently the back room of the deserted shop.

A dark room it must have been, even in broadest daylight. Opposite to
the door by which they had entered was one which was glazed in the upper
half; this evidently led into the shop itself, although the old red
curtain which hung over the glass panes hid the view of what was beyond.
There was a little fireplace, in which were the burnt-out ashes of a
recent fire. There was a deal table in the middle of the room, and a
cloth of a common pattern o