a's manner changed to
positive alarm as she indicated, in the dark subterranean corridor, the
door that was locked on the prisoner. Not merely the presence of Mr.
Prohack had thrilled the basement floor; there was a thrill greater even
than that, and Mr. Prohack, by demanding the door of the servants' hall
was intensifying the thrill to the last degree. The key was on the
outside of the door, which he unlocked. Within the electric light was
still burning in the obscure dawn.

The prisoner, who sprang up from a chair and curtsied fearsomely at the
astonishing spectacle of Mr. Prohack, was fat in a superlative degree,
and her obesity gave her a middle-aged air to which she probably had no
right by the almanac. She looked quite forty, and might well have been
not more than thirty. She made a typical London figure of the
nondescript industrial class. It is inadequate to say that her shabby
black-trimmed bonnet, her shabby sham-fur coat half hiding a large
dubious apron, her shabby frayed black skirt, and her shabby, immense,
amorphous boots,--it is inadequate to say that these things seemed to
have come immediately out of a tenth-rate pawnshop; the woman herself
seemed to have come, all of a piece with her garments, out of a
tenth-rate pawnshop; the entity of her was at any rate homogeneous; it
sounded no discord.

She did nothing so active as to weep, but tears, obeying the law of
gravity, oozed out of her small eyes, and ran in zigzags, unsummoned and
unchecked, down her dark-red cheeks.

"Oh, sir!" she mumbled in a wee, scarcely articulate voice. "I'm a
respectable woman, so help me God!"

"You shall be respected," said Mr. Prohack. "Sit down and drink some of
this tea and eat the bread-and-butter.... No! I don't want you to say
anything just yet. No, nothing at all."

When she had got the tea into the cup, she poured it into the saucer and
blew on it and began to drink loudly. After two sips she plucked at a
piece of bread-and-butter, conveyed it into her mouth, and before doing
anything further to it, sirruped up some more tea. And in this way she
went on. Her table manners convinced Mr. Prohack that her claim to
respectability was authentic.

"And now," said Mr. Prohack, gazing through the curtained window at the
blank wall that ended above him at the edge of the pavement, so as not
to embarrass her, "will you tell me why you spent the night in my area?"

"Because some one locked the gate on me, sir, while I w