e by any chance open. Now and again a step
from a great distance would tap-tap-tap, a far-off delicacy of sound,
and either die away down echoing side streets or come clanking on to
where he stood, growing louder and clearer and more resonant, ringing
again and again in doubled and trebled echoes; while he, standing far
back in a doorway, watched to see who was abroad at the dead of
night--and then that person went away on his strange errand, his
footsteps tramping down immense distances, till the last echo and the
last faint tremble of his feet eddied into the stillness. Now and
again a cat dodged gingerly along a railing, or a strayed dog slunk
fearfully down the pathway, nosing everywhere in and out of the
lamplight, silent and hungry and desperately eager. He told her
stories also, wonderful tales of great fights and cunning tricks, of
men and women whose whole lives were tricks, of people who did not
know how to live except by theft and violence; people who were born by
stealth, who ate by subterfuge, drank by dodges, got married in antics
and slid into death by strange, subterranean passages. He told her the
story of the Two Hungry Men, and of The Sailor Who Had Been Robbed,
and a funny tale about the Barber Who Had Two Mothers. He also told
her the stories of The Eight Tinkers, and of the Old Women Who Steal
Fish at Nighttime, and the story of The Man He Let Off, and he told
her a terrible story of how he fought five men in a little room, and
he showed her a great livid scar hidden by his cap, and the marks in
his neck where he had been stabbed with a jagged bottle, and his wrist
which an Italian mad-man had thrust through and through with a dagger.

But though he was always talking he was not always talking of himself.
Through his conversation there ran a succession of queries--tiny
slender questions which ran out of his stories and into her life.
Questions so skillful and natural and spontaneous that only a girl
could discover the curiosity which prompted them. He wanted her name,
her address, her mother's name, her father's name; had she other
relatives, did she go to work yet, what was her religion, was it a
long time since she left school, and what was her mother's business?
To all of these Mary Makebelieve answered with glad candor. She saw
each question coming, and the personal curiosity lying behind it she
divined and was glad of. She would have loved to ask him personal and
intimate questions about his p