Epicures have it that a steak fried is a steak spoiled. Neither of those who ate that one would have agreed to the truth of the statement then. From the way in which they disposed of it, a finer, juicier, or more tender steak was never known. The old woman produced a jug of porter to wash it down. Freddy, as the old woman called the thief, did far more justice to this than Bertie did. With the aid of the dark-coloured liquid the whole pound and a half of meat rapidly disappeared, and with it the better part of a loaf as well. The old woman sat spectator of the feast. "There was a time when I could eat like that. It's over now a hundred years ago, but I mind it as though it were yesterday." "Go on! you're not a hundred years old!" "I'm a hundred and twenty-two next Tuesday week." Bertie stared, holding a mouthful of steak suspended on his fork in the air. A hundred and twenty-two! What was his tale of years compared to that? Freddy winked at him. "Yes, I daresay. You were a hundred and ninety-five yesterday, and sixty-two this morning. It's my belief you're about five and twenty." "Five and twenty! I daresay I look it, but I ain't. I'm more than that. I always did look a wild young thing." Freddy roared; anything looking less like five and twenty, or a "wild young thing," could scarcely be conceived. The old woman went placidly on. "I remember Jacky Sheppard, and Dicky Turpin, and Tommy King; they were all highwaymen in my young days." "I suppose you were a highwayman's wife?" "So I was; and they hung him the week after we were married. I went and saw him hung, and I've never seen a better hanging since. No, that I haven't. Times is changed since then." "But you ain't changed. I wonder you don't marry again, a wild young thing like you." "I ain't a marrying sort--not now I ain't. I've had ten of them, and that's quite enough for me." "Lor', no! What is ten?" "Ten's quite enough for one young woman, and when you've been two hundred and ninety times in prison a woman don't feel much like marrying again. It takes it out of her, it do." Bertie had ended his meal. The warmth and the food had given the finishing touch to his previous fatigue; his head was already nodding on his breast. He heard the old woman talking as in a dream. Ten husbands! two hundred and ninety times in jail! Were they part of his nightmare, the things which he heard her say? "Hollo, Ikey, you're blinking! Now then, mother, where are you going to put my pal? Can't you find a place where he can be alone?" Had Bertie been sufficiently wide awake he would have seen the speaker wink at the old woman. "There's only the captain's room." The woman's suggestion seemed to startle Freddy, and to set him thinking. "The captain's room? Where is the captain?" "How am I to know where he is or where he ain't? He don't tell me none of his goings on, none of you don't. He says to me he'd be four or five days away. That's all I know about it. Times is changed!"