hen we first met.

"You are looking at me, and you are thinking of something," she said,
with her strange breathless rapidity of utterance. "What is it?"

"Nothing extraordinary," I answered. "I was only wondering how you
came here."

"I came with a friend who is very good to me. I have only been here
two days."

"And you found your way to this place yesterday?"

"How do you know that?"

"I only guessed it."

She turned from me, and knelt down before the inscription once more.

"Where should I go if not here?" she said. "The friend who was better
than a mother to me is the only friend I have to visit at Limmeridge.
Oh, it makes my heart ache to see a stain on her tomb! It ought to be
kept white as snow, for her sake. I was tempted to begin cleaning it
yesterday, and I can't help coming back to go on with it to-day. Is
there anything wrong in that? I hope not. Surely nothing can be wrong
that I do for Mrs. Fairlie's sake?"

The old grateful sense of her benefactress's kindness was evidently the
ruling idea still in the poor creature's mind--the narrow mind which
had but too plainly opened to no other lasting impression since that
first impression of her younger and happier days. I saw that my best
chance of winning her confidence lay in encouraging her to proceed with
the artless employment which she had come into the burial-ground to
pursue. She resumed it at once, on my telling her she might do so,
touching the hard marble as tenderly as if it had been a sentient
thing, and whispering the words of the inscription to herself, over and
over again, as if the lost days of her girlhood had returned and she
was patiently learning her lesson once more at Mrs. Fairlie's knees.

"Should you wonder very much," I said, preparing the way as cautiously
as I could for the questions that were to come, "if I owned that it is
a satisfaction to me, as well as a surprise, to see you here? I felt
very uneasy about you after you left me in the cab."

She looked up quickly and suspiciously.

"Uneasy," she repeated. "Why?"

"A strange thing happened after we parted that night. Two men overtook
me in a chaise. They did not see where I was standing, but they
stopped near me, and spoke to a policeman on the other side of the way."

She instantly suspended her employment. The hand holding the damp
cloth with which she had been cleaning the inscription dropped to her
side. The other hand grasped the marble cross at