A buxom, powerful-looking woman opened the door; Downing recognised her at once as a certain Mary Crisp, the niece of his old landlord, and as she stood waiting for him to speak he remembered that as a girl she had not been allowed to do much of the waiting on her uncle's 'gentlemen.' There was no glimmer of recognition in her placid face, and, in answer to the request that he might see the rooms where he had once lived 'for a short time,' she invited him civilly enough to come in, and to follow her upstairs. 'I expect it's the same paper, sir,' she said, as she opened the door of what had been his sitting-room. 'It was put up when uncle first took on the house, and, as it cost half a crown a foot, we always cleans it once every three years with breadcrumbs, and it comes out as new.' How well Downing remembered the paper, with its dark-blue ground thickly sprinkled with gold stars! indeed, before she spoke again, he knew what her next words would be. 'It's the same pattern that the Queen and Prince Albert chose for putting up at Windsor Castle; you don't see such a good paper, nor such a good pattern, nowadays; but there, I'll just leave you a minute while you take a look round.' V For some moments Downing remained standing just inside the door, as much that he had forgotten, and more that he had tried vainly to forget, came back to him in a turgid flood of recollection. Suddenly something in the walls creaked, and he clenched his hands, half expecting to see figures form themselves out of the shadows. One memory was spared him; the sombre walls, the plain, heavy old furniture, placed much as it had been in his time, evoked no vision of the foreign woman who had brought him to disgrace, for, with a certain boyish chivalry, he had never allowed her to come to his rooms; instead, poor fool that he had been, he had occasionally entertained her in his official quarters, and the fact had been one of those which had most weighed against him with his informal judges. Instead, the place where he now stood brought to his mind another woman, who had during those same years and months played a nobler, but alas! a far minor part in his life.