we show full trust and confidence in others, they
will prove worthy of that trust. Her coming indoors had now become a
matter of principle, and I insisted. I even said I could lend her a
dressing-gown and slippers, so that her wet clothes might be dried by
the kitchen fire.

She murmured something about a good Samaritan, but still demurred, and
asked if I had a bath-room. I said I had.

That decided her. She seemed to have no difficulty in making up her
mind. She did not see two sides to things, as I always do myself.

She said that if I liked to allow her to go to the bath-room first, she
should be happy to accept my kind invitation for an hour or so. If not,
she would stay where she was.

* * * * *

Half an hour later she was sitting opposite me in the parlour, on the
other side of the wood fire, sipping her coffee. I had not put down the
brown paper or the mackintosh. It was not necessary. Her close-cropped,
curly grey hair, still damp from the bath, was parted, and brushed
stiffly back over her ears. It must have been very beautiful hair once.
Her thin hands and thinner face and neck looked more like brown
parchment than ever, as she sat in the lamplight, my old blue
dressing-gown folded negligently round her, and taking picturesque folds
which it never did when I was inside it. Those long, gaunt limbs must
have been graceful once. Her feet were bare in her slippers--in my
slippers, I mean. She looked rather like a well-bred Indian.

It was obvious that she was a lady, but her speech had already told me
that. What amazed me most where all amazed me was her self-possession.

I wondered what her impression of me was, as we sat, such a strangely
assorted couple, one on each side of the fire. Did I indeed seem to her
the quixotic, impetuous, and yet withal dreamy creature which my books
show me to be? But I have often been told by those who know me well that
I am much more than my books.

"I have not sat by a fire for how many months?" she said, her black eyes
on the logs. "Let me see, last time was in a lonely cottage on the
Cotswolds. It was a night like this, but colder, and a helpless old
couple let me in, and allowed me to dry my clothes, and lie by their
fire all night. Very unwise of them, wasn't it? I might have murdered
them in their beds."

I began to feel rather uncomfortable.

"You are not undergoing a sentence for murder, are you?" I asked.

She looked at me for