She sat silent, her dreamy eyes fixed, her thin hands folded one over the other. I looked at her with an aching heart. What strange mixture of truth and lies was all this! But I said nothing. What was the use? And as we sat silent beside the dying fire the great inequality between us pressed hard upon me: I, by no special virtue of my own, God knows! on one of the uppermost rungs of life. She poor soul--poor soul--on the lowest. The clock on the mantelpiece chimed eleven. She started slightly, looked at it, and then at me, as if uncertain of her surroundings, and the shrewd, sardonic look came back to her face. "I am keeping you up," she said, rising. "I think your strong coffee has gone to my head. This outburst of autobiography is a poor return for all your kindness. I had no idea it was so late or that I could be so garrulous, and I must make a very early start to-morrow. Shall I go into the kitchen and put on my own clothes again? They must be quite dry by now." "Oh! let me help you," I said impulsively. "Let me get you into a Home, or help you to emigrate. Don't go back to this wandering, aimless life. Work for others, interest in others, that is what _you_ need, what _I_ need, what we _all_ need to take us out of ourselves, to make us forget our own misery." "I have half forgotten mine already," she said. "To-night I remembered it again. But I have long since put it from my mind. I think the moment for a change of clothing in the kitchen has arrived." She spoke quietly, but as if her last word were final. I found it impossible to continue the subject. "You will never escape in those clothes," I said. "You haven't the ghost of a chance. If you will come into my room, I will see what I can find for you." I had been willing to do much more than give her clothes, but I instinctively felt that my appeal to her better feelings had fallen on deaf ears. She followed me to my bedroom, and I got out all my oldest clothes and spread them before her. But she would have none of them. "The worst look like an ultra-respectable district visitor," she said, tossing aside one garment after another. It was the more curious that she should say that because my brother-in-law had always said I looked like one, and that my books even had a parochial flavour about them. But then he had never really studied them, or he would have seen their lighter side. "I had no idea pockets were worn in a little slit in the front seam," said my visitor. "It shows how long it is since I have been 'in the know.' No doubt front pockets came in with the bicycles. No. It is very kind of you. But, except for that old dyed moreen petticoat, the things won't do. I always was particular about dress, and I never was more so than I am at this moment. You don't happen to have an old black ulster with all the buttons off, and a bit of mangy fur dropping off the neck? That's more my style. But of course you haven't."