Something in her reluctance made me the more determined. Besides, one of the truths on which I have insisted most strongly in my "Veil of the Temple" is that if we show full trust and confidence in others, they will prove worthy of that trust. Her coming indoors had now become a matter of principle, and I insisted. I even said I could lend her a dressing-gown and slippers, so that her wet clothes might be dried by the kitchen fire. She murmured something about a good Samaritan, but still demurred, and asked if I had a bath-room. I said I had. That decided her. She seemed to have no difficulty in making up her mind. She did not see two sides to things, as I always do myself. She said that if I liked to allow her to go to the bath-room first, she should be happy to accept my kind invitation for an hour or so. If not, she would stay where she was. * * * * * Half an hour later she was sitting opposite me in the parlour, on the other side of the wood fire, sipping her coffee. I had not put down the brown paper or the mackintosh. It was not necessary. Her close-cropped, curly grey hair, still damp from the bath, was parted, and brushed stiffly back over her ears. It must have been very beautiful hair once. Her thin hands and thinner face and neck looked more like brown parchment than ever, as she sat in the lamplight, my old blue dressing-gown folded negligently round her, and taking picturesque folds which it never did when I was inside it. Those long, gaunt limbs must have been graceful once. Her feet were bare in her slippers--in my slippers, I mean. She looked rather like a well-bred Indian. It was obvious that she was a lady, but her speech had already told me that. What amazed me most where all amazed me was her self-possession. I wondered what her impression of me was, as we sat, such a strangely assorted couple, one on each side of the fire. Did I indeed seem to her the quixotic, impetuous, and yet withal dreamy creature which my books show me to be? But I have often been told by those who know me well that I am much more than my books. "I have not sat by a fire for how many months?" she said, her black eyes on the logs. "Let me see, last time was in a lonely cottage on the Cotswolds. It was a night like this, but colder, and a helpless old couple let me in, and allowed me to dry my clothes, and lie by their fire all night. Very unwise of them, wasn't it? I might have murdered them in their beds." I began to feel rather uncomfortable. "You are not undergoing a sentence for murder, are you?" I asked. She looked at me for a moment, and then said: "The desperate creature who escaped from gaol three days ago, and who was in for life for the murder of the man she lived with, and whose convict clothes I am wearing--whose clothes, I mean, are at this moment drying before your kitchen fire--is not the same woman who is now drinking your excellent coffee."