Belden came in with the announcement that supper was ready.
"As for your room," said she, "I have prepared my own room for your use,
thinking you would like to remain on the first floor." And, throwing
open a door at my side, she displayed a small, but comfortable room,
in which I could dimly see a bed, an immense bureau, and a shadowy
looking-glass in a dark, old-fashioned frame.

"I live in very primitive fashion," she resumed, leading the way into
the dining-room; "but I mean to be comfortable and make others so."

"I should say you amply succeeded," I rejoined, with an appreciative
glance at her well-spread board.

She smiled, and I felt I had paved the way to her good graces in a way
that would yet redound to my advantage.

Shall I ever forget that supper! its dainties, its pleasant freedom, its
mysterious, pervading atmosphere of unreality: and the constant sense
which every bountiful dish she pressed upon me brought of the shame of
eating this woman's food with such feelings of suspicion in my heart!
Shall I ever forget the emotion I experienced when I first perceived
she had something on her mind, which she longed, yet hesitated, to give
utterance to! Or how she started when a cat jumped from the sloping roof
of the kitchen on to the grass-plot at the back of the house; or how my
heart throbbed when I heard, or thought I heard, a board creak overhead!
We were in a long and narrow room which seemed, curiously enough, to run
crosswise of the house, opening on one side into the parlor, and on the
other into the small bedroom, which had been allotted to my use.

"You live in this house alone, without fear?" I asked, as Mrs. Belden,
contrary to my desire, put another bit of cold chicken on my plate.
"Have you no marauders in this town: no tramps, of whom a solitary woman
like you might reasonably be afraid?"

"No one will hurt me," said she; "and no one ever came here for food or
shelter but got it."

"I should think, then, that living as you do, upon a railroad, you would
be constantly overrun with worthless beings whose only trade is to take
all they can get without giving a return."

"I cannot turn them away. It is the only luxury I have: to feed the
poor."

"But the idle, restless ones, who neither will work, nor let others
work----"

"Are still the poor."

Mentally remarking, here is the woman to shield an unfortunate who has
somehow become entangled in the meshes of a great crime, I drew back
from