It was not altogether the intent to deceive, that kept me from opening the matter to her in the beginning, but a feeling that the less advice I had about it the better. And if I did tell her, I wished first to arrange that I need not feel any constraint upon me of our habit of living together. I was anxious to have Helmeth find me when he came, free to be all to him that our love demanded, and in view of all the years in which Sarah and I had lived together, I did not know how to go about it. I began to think that I should have to tell her after all, when the Powers, who must have known very well what was going on, took that into account also. Sarah's season began a week before mine, and I remember her saying that she would be glad when we could come home together, as she had had an uneasy sensation for the last night or two, of some one following her. Sarah had any number of admirers, but the sort of men who were attracted to her still splendour, were not the kind to follow her home at night. "Turn them over to the police," I suggested. I had had to try that once or twice. "Oh, I couldn't!" She turned scarlet. Even after all those years I had not realized how all her life was timed to catch the slightest approaching footfall of what, to her simple faith, must inevitably come. I found her waiting for me at the stage door on my first night--no matter how many of them you have, first nights are always in the balance--and we were so taken up with discussing how I had got on with it, that it wasn't until I was fitting the key in the lock that I was recalled to the occasion of her annoyance. Just below us there seemed to be a man dodging in and out of the blocks of shadow made by the high-railed stairways that led up to the first floor of the row of flats in which our rooms were located. Something in the figure, or in our standing there before the shadowed door with the dull light of the transom over us, brushed me with a light wing of memory; I seemed to recall some such conjunction before, but it was gone before I could connote the suggestion with time or place. All I said to Sarah was that if we saw anything more of that we would certainly speak to the police. The next night we went to supper with friends, and it was after midnight when my cab--Sarah didn't afford cabs for herself--drew up at the door. The approach to it was by way of a handsome pair of stairs with an ornamental iron railing of so close a pattern that any one sitting on the steps in the dark, would be pretty well concealed by it. That there was some one so sitting, dropped there in a stupour of fatigue or drunkenness, we did not discover until we stumbled fairly on to him.