feet were thrust into loose slippers: and her hair hung
low on her neck in dark masses as she had knotted them for the night.

"Where do you come from, boy?" she asked; but an instant later she
put that question aside as an idle one. "Someone has been
ill-treating you! Come indoors!"

She held out a hand and, as I clung to it, led me to the door; but
turned with her other hand on the latch. "Is anyone following?"

I shook my head. She was attempting now, but gently, to draw back
the hand to which I clung; and, in resisting, my fingers met and
pulled against a ring--a single ring of plain gold.

Seeing that I had observed it, she made no further effort, but let
her hand lie, her eyes at the same moment meeting mine and searching
them gravely and curiously.

"Come upstairs," she said; "but tread softly. My father is a light
sleeper."

She took me to a room in the corner of which stood a white bed with
the sheets neatly turned down, prepared and ready for a guest.
The room was filled with the scent of flowers--fragrant scent of
roses and clean aromatic scent of carnations. There were fainter
scents, too, of jasmine and lavender; the first wafted in from a
great bush beyond the open lattice, the second (as I afterwards
discovered) exhaled by the white linen of the bed. But flowers were
everywhere, in bowls and jars and glasses; and as though other
receptacles for them had failed, one long spray of small roses
climbed the dressing-table from a brown pitcher at its foot.

She motioned me to a chair beside the bed, and, almost before I knew
what was intended, she had fetched a basin of water and was kneeling
to wash my feet.

"No--please!" I protested.

"But I love children," she whispered; "and you are but a child."

So I sat in a kind of dream while she washed away the dust and blood,
changing the water twice, and afterwards dried each foot in a towel,
pressing firmly but never once hurting me.

When this was done, she rose and stood musing, contemplating me
seriously and yet with a touch of mirth in her eyes.

"You are such a little one!" she said. "Father's would never fit."
And having poured out fresh water and bidden me wash my body, she
stole out.

She returned with a white garment in her hand and real mirth now in
her eyes. My toilet done, she slipped the garment over me. It fell
to my feet in long folds, yet so lightly that I scarcely felt I was
clothed: and she clapped her hands in dumb-sho