"Ah, your solicitor will tell you that--when you give him the chance! He very properly would not care to bother you about trifles until the case against you was satisfactorily disposed of. By the way, I hope you don't mind my cigar? We were smoking in the next room." "I have taken you from your guests," said Rachel, miserably. "I know I ought not to have come at such an hour." Carrington did not contradict her. "But there seemed so much to speak about," she went desperately on. "There are the money matters and--and--" "If you will come to my chambers," said Carrington, "I shall be delighted to go into things with you, and to advise you to the best of my ability. If you could manage to come at half-past nine on Monday morning, I would be there early and could give you twenty minutes." He wrote down the address, and, handing it to Rachel, rang the bell. This drove her to despair; evidently it never occurred to him that she was faint with weariness and hunger, that she had nowhere to go for the night, and not the price of a decent meal, much less a bed, in her purse. And even now her pride prevented her from telling the truth; but it would not silence her supreme desire. "Oh!" she cried; "oh, may I not speak to your wife?" "Not to-night, if you don't mind," replied Carrington, with his bow and smile. "We can't both desert our guests." "Only for a minute!" pleaded Rachel. "I wouldn't keep her more!" "Not to-night," he repeated, with a broader smile, a clearer enunciation, and a decision so obviously irrevocable that Rachel said no more. But she would not see the hand that he could afford to hold out to her now; and as for going near his chambers, never, never, though she starved! "No, I wouldn't have kept her," she sobbed in the street; "but she would have kept me! I know her! I know her! She would have had pity on me, in spite of him; but now I can never go near either of them again!" Then where was she to go? God knew! No respectable hotel would take her in without luggage or a deposit. What was she to do? But while she wondered her feet were carrying her once more in the old direction, and as she walked an idea came. She was very near the fatal little street at the time. She turned about, and then to the left. In a few moments she was timorously knocking at the door of a house with a card in the window. "It's you!" cried the woman who came, almost shutting the door in Rachel's face, leaving just space enough for her own. "You have a room to let," said Rachel, steadily. "But not to you," said the woman, quickly; and Rachel was not surprised, the other was so pale, so strangely agitated. "But why?" she asked. "I have been acquitted--thanks partly to your own evidence--and yet you of all women will not take me in! Do you mean to tell me that you actually think I did it still?"