He tossed and turned in his bed until daylight, and rose with the earliest dawn, worn and haggard, with the intention of walking in the Park before he took his breakfast. It was seven o’clock as the Professor turned out of the front door of his dingy lodgings--an unprecedented thing on his part, for he usually sat up so late, that he did not leave the house until his first lessons were due. As he reached the lower passage, he found the front door open and the girl Hannah cleaning the steps. Ricardo passed her with a bow, for he was a most courteous man in his dealings with women, but Hannah’s head was bent upon her work, and she did not see him. As Ricardo gained the pavement he turned and looked at her. She was kneeling in the attitude in which such work is done, and her slip-shod shoes which had half fallen off, left her feet, encased in black worsted stockings, well exposed to view. They were large feet, as has been said before, and two holes in her stockings left the naked heels bare for the admiration of the passers-by. The Professor stopped for a moment and regarded those heels. They were not pretty perhaps, but they were rosy and firm, and undeniably youthful, and somehow they inspired him with a certain amount of compassion, to think that such young flesh should have to bear its burden of life so soon. He stood as though transfixed by the sight of those two rosy heels. No thought of lust, or even admiration, entered his mind, which was far too sensitive and refined for any feeling of the kind, but they excited his pity, and carried him back somehow to the days when he, too, was young and innocent. He felt as if he wanted to say something kind to the poor young girl who had begun so early to drudge for others. The rosy heels, though only seen through the ugly medium of a pair of ragged stockings, attracted him as a callow nestling with gaping beak, or a little pink apple hanging in an orchard might have done. He would have no desire to possess the callow bird, and the idea of eating the sour apple would have set his teeth on edge--yet they would have carried with them a memory of the days when he would have enjoyed them both--and in this light he felt drawn towards Hannah Stubbs as she scrubbed the front door steps. He had a shilling in his pocket, and he stepped back to give it to her. Perhaps a shilling might represent many things that would give pleasure to the little household drudge--but as the Professor drew near to her the second time, he perceived that Hannah was crying and the tears were dropping on the flags she knelt upon, and mingling with the hearth-stone. Tears in the eyes of a woman always excited the Signor’s sympathy, and, forgetting the shilling, he inquired eagerly why Hannah wept. The girl looked frightened at being detected in such an act of self-indulgence. “It’s nothing, Sir--nothing!” she exclaimed, as she hastily rubbed her eyes with her knuckles and smeared her face over with the hearth-stone.