and then I heard her making her rounds, closing the
shutters on the ground floor, and locking the front door--at least,
trying to do so. I had already locked and bolted it. Then she locked the
scullery door on the outside, abstracted the key, and I heard her step
on the brick path, and the click of the gate. _She was gone_.

I always heated the coffee myself over the parlour fire. It was already
bubbling on the hob. Directly she had left I went to the kitchen, and
got a second cup. I felt much better since I had had supper. And as I
took the cup from the shelf the fantastic idea came into my mind to ask
my protegee to come in and drink her coffee by the fire in the parlour.
I must frankly own it was foolhardy; it was rash, it was even dangerous.
But there it is! One cannot help the way one is made, and I am afraid I
am not of those who invariably take the coldly prudent course and stick
to it.

I turned the idea over in my mind. I could put down sheets of brown
paper--I always have a store--from the door to the fire, and an old
mackintosh over the worst armchair, which was to be re-covered. Besides,
I had not had a good look at her yet, or made out the real woman under
the prison garb. That she was a person of education and refinement may
appear hardly credible to my readers, but to one like myself, whose
_metier_ it is to probe the secrets of my own heart and those of
others--to _me_ it was sufficiently obvious from the first moment that,
though I had to deal with a criminal, she was a very exceptional one,
and belonging to my own class. I went out to the stable, and suggested
to her that she should come in.

"How do you know that I am not a man in disguise?" came a voice from the
darkness; and it seemed to me, not for the first time, that she was
amused at something. "I'm tall enough. Just think how stupendous it
would be if, when I was inside and the door really locked, I proved to
be a wicked, devastating, burglarious male."

"I wish you would not say things like that," I said. "On your honour,
_are_ you a man?"

She hesitated, and then said in a changed voice:

"I am not. I don't know what I am. I was a woman once, just as a
derelict was a ship once. But whatever I am, I am not fit to come into a
self-respecting house. I am one solid cake of mud."

Something in her reluctance made me the more determined. Besides, one of
the truths on which I have insisted most strongly in my "Veil of the
Temple" is that if