-and if you will only promise not to
interfere with me, and to let me leave you, when and how I please--I
have a friend in London who will be glad to receive me--I want nothing
else--will you promise?"

She looked anxiously up and down the road; shifted her bag again from
one hand to the other; repeated the words, "Will you promise?" and
looked hard in my face, with a pleading fear and confusion that it
troubled me to see.

What could I do? Here was a stranger utterly and helplessly at my
mercy--and that stranger a forlorn woman. No house was near; no one
was passing whom I could consult; and no earthly right existed on my
part to give me a power of control over her, even if I had known how to
exercise it. I trace these lines, self-distrustfully, with the shadows
of after-events darkening the very paper I write on; and still I say,
what could I do?

What I did do, was to try and gain time by questioning her. "Are you
sure that your friend in London will receive you at such a late hour as
this?" I said.

"Quite sure. Only say you will let me leave you when and how I
please--only say you won't interfere with me. Will you promise?"

As she repeated the words for the third time, she came close to me and
laid her hand, with a sudden gentle stealthiness, on my bosom--a thin
hand; a cold hand (when I removed it with mine) even on that sultry
night. Remember that I was young; remember that the hand which touched
me was a woman's.

"Will you promise?"

"Yes."

One word! The little familiar word that is on everybody's lips, every
hour in the day. Oh me! and I tremble, now, when I write it.

We set our faces towards London, and walked on together in the first
still hour of the new day--I, and this woman, whose name, whose
character, whose story, whose objects in life, whose very presence by
my side, at that moment, were fathomless mysteries to me. It was like
a dream. Was I Walter Hartright? Was this the well-known, uneventful
road, where holiday people strolled on Sundays? Had I really left,
little more than an hour since, the quiet, decent, conventionally
domestic atmosphere of my mother's cottage? I was too bewildered--too
conscious also of a vague sense of something like self-reproach--to
speak to my strange companion for some minutes. It was her voice again
that first broke the silence between us.

"I want to ask you something," she said suddenly. "Do you know many
people in London?"

"Yes, a great