He strode on, the fall already making a soft cold mat to his feet. It was no great distance to his rooms; the Rue St Honoré was near deserted, and he went down it swiftly. Once again only he turned to see that the girl was not lagging. Then he cursed himself and came to a stop under a lamp. She was hobbling towards him as fast as her bleeding feet would permit her. He had never given a thought to this--that she had been driven half naked into the night. As she came up, she dumbly begged of him with a little pathetic smile, timid and conciliatory, not to be angry with her for halting. He saw a trickle of blood flow into the white carpet where she waited. Now he stood to the struggle between his pride and his humanity. She was slight and thinly clad. He might have carried her in his arms the little remaining distance. But a hard devil rasped his heart--that particular Belial that tempts consciences to very wanton self-mutilations. “I had not thought,” he said coldly. “I should have been more considerate. I will walk slowly the rest of the way.” “I hardly feel it--indeed, monsieur, indeed,” she answered, brokenly and eagerly. “I will come faster.” He went on again, and she crept behind him. Arrived at last at his door, he rapped on it, and stood away, signing to her to enter. The citizen Theophilus, although he was a good patriot, bowed the gentleman and his companion into the sadly lit hall with a conscious elaboration of the _bel air_. He was at different times cook and _concierge_, and always proprietor--a man of admirable tact. Now he smiled, and informed monsieur the Englishman that there was a grateful hot fire in his room; that the night was a disgrace to Paris; that a steaming potage could be served to the citoyenne in a moment, did monsieur desire it. He did not shrug his shoulders, or appear to notice the bare raw feet set upon the mat, or anything strange in this apparition of a dazed young woman standing there with the snow in her hair. That was his delicacy. For the rest, reputations were not marred nowadays by any refusal to subscribe to such old-fashioned codes of propriety as were only practised, if at all, in the prisons, where the remnants of a social hypocrisy awaited consignment to the rag-tearing machine in the Place Louis XV. Citizen Theophilus would have as little thought of bestowing a suggestive wink on the mating of a couple of swallows as on the foregathering of a young man and maid under his eaves. “I will do myself the honour,” he said, “to conduct monsieur’s dear young friend to monsieur’s apartments.” He skipped up the stairs in advance, candle in hand, like an _ignis fatuus_. He was a little man--always dancingly restless--with a lean face, and iron-grey corkscrew curls that he would keep well oiled, as though they were the actual springs of his movements.