"I will bring you a cup of coffee later," I said. I was beginning to feel a kind of proprietorship in her. She would have starved but for me. My servant always left at nine o'clock, to sleep at her father's cottage, just over the way. I have a bell in the roof, which I can ring with a cord in case of fire or thieves. To-night she was, of course, later than usual, but at last she brought in the coffee, and then I heard her making her rounds, closing the shutters on the ground floor, and locking the front door--at least, trying to do so. I had already locked and bolted it. Then she locked the scullery door on the outside, abstracted the key, and I heard her step on the brick path, and the click of the gate. _She was gone_. I always heated the coffee myself over the parlour fire. It was already bubbling on the hob. Directly she had left I went to the kitchen, and got a second cup. I felt much better since I had had supper. And as I took the cup from the shelf the fantastic idea came into my mind to ask my protegee to come in and drink her coffee by the fire in the parlour. I must frankly own it was foolhardy; it was rash, it was even dangerous. But there it is! One cannot help the way one is made, and I am afraid I am not of those who invariably take the coldly prudent course and stick to it. I turned the idea over in my mind. I could put down sheets of brown paper--I always have a store--from the door to the fire, and an old mackintosh over the worst armchair, which was to be re-covered. Besides, I had not had a good look at her yet, or made out the real woman under the prison garb. That she was a person of education and refinement may appear hardly credible to my readers, but to one like myself, whose _metier_ it is to probe the secrets of my own heart and those of others--to _me_ it was sufficiently obvious from the first moment that, though I had to deal with a criminal, she was a very exceptional one, and belonging to my own class. I went out to the stable, and suggested to her that she should come in. "How do you know that I am not a man in disguise?" came a voice from the darkness; and it seemed to me, not for the first time, that she was amused at something. "I'm tall enough. Just think how stupendous it would be if, when I was inside and the door really locked, I proved to be a wicked, devastating, burglarious male." "I wish you would not say things like that," I said. "On your honour, _are_ you a man?" She hesitated, and then said in a changed voice: "I am not. I don't know what I am. I was a woman once, just as a derelict was a ship once. But whatever I am, I am not fit to come into a self-respecting house. I am one solid cake of mud."