r troubles. Even the child in her
arms, worn out with weeping perhaps, had fallen asleep. He stared at
the pair of them vacantly. His lamp, his music, all the apparatus of
his gentle and decorous existence were as he had left them; their
familiar and prosaic quality made his adventure appear by contrast
monstrous.

The Jewess was watching him. In her dark, serious way she had a
certain striking beauty. Her grave eyes waited for him to look at
her.

"What is it?" he said at last.

"If I might put the child down," she suggested timidly.

Lucas pointed to the double-doors of his bedroom. "My bed is in
there," he answered. She lowered her head, as though in obedience to
a command he had given, and carried the child out. Lucas watched her
go, and then crossed the room to a cupboard which contained, among
other things, a bottle of brandy.

While he was drinking she returned, pausing in the door to look back
at the child. He noticed that she left the door partly open to hear
it if it should wake, and somehow this struck him as particularly
moving.

She came across the room to him, with her steadfast eyes on his face,
and, without speaking, fell on her knees before him and put the edge
of his coat to her lips.

Lucas stood while she did it; he hardly dared to move and interrupt
that reverent and symbolic act of gratitude. But once again, as when
on the pavement she had held the child to him in frantic appeal, the
simple soul within him flamed into splendor, and he was in touch with
great passions and mighty emotions. It is the mood of martyrs and
heroes. He looked down to her dark eyes, bright with swimming tears,
and helped her to her feet.

"You shall be safe here," he told her. "Nobody shall touch you here."

She believed it utterly; he was a champion sent straight from God;
she had seen him conquering and irresistible. To fear now would be a
blasphemy.

"I am quite safe," she agreed. "I am not afraid. To-morrow some of my
people will come for me."

He nodded. "There is some food in the cupboard there," he told her.
"Milk, too, if the child wants it. And nobody can come up the stairs
without meeting me; and if they try, God help them!"

She half smiled at the idea. "They would never dare," she agreed
confidently.

He would have been glad of his overcoat, but that was in his bedroom,
and he dreaded the indelicacy of going there while she was present.
So in the event he bade her a brief good-night, and found