"One evening--I'd had a bad day--I was hawking in the Strand, just where I met you when I saw you with those boards upon your back. How it all came back to me! My flowers had not been in very good condition in the morning, they had not grown fresher as the day went on. I offered them to a man who came sauntering along; he stopped to look at them, he soon spotted the state that they were in. 'Why,' he said, 'these things are only fit for throwing away.' Then he looked at me. 'Bertha!' he exclaimed, 'surely it must be you?'" She laughed. Turning, she stood looking down into the fire, tapping her toe against the curb. "If I'd only had a peep at him in time I should have let him pass; I shouldn't have tried to make of him a customer, but I hadn't. I had just seen that he was well dressed and looked as though he had money, and, in the dim light, that was all." She paused for so considerable a space of time that one wondered if she proposed to carry the story any farther. When she did go on it was in an altered tone of voice; she spoke very quietly, very coldly, as if she wished to make a mere statement of facts. "In one of the shops in which I had had the honour of being an assistant he had acted as shopwalker. We had been on quite decent terms, which was not the case with most of the gentlemen of his sort that I had come across. Rather than that he should have seen me, in my rags, hawking faded flowers in the streets, I would--I would have done anything. When I tried to get away from him he wouldn't hear of it. He called a cab, put me in it, and took me home with him, to his wife; they had quite a nice little house Peckham way. I recognised her as one of the girls who had been at the opposite counter to mine. It was not strange that he had married her; what was queer was that they should be living in such a house, unless one of them had come into a fortune." Again she paused, staring at the fire as if she were seeking words among the burning coals. Then, turning, she faced the man who was still seated at the table. He had scarcely moved since she had begun her story, as if he found in it a fascination that was not upon the surface, as if he were looking forward, with eager interest, to what he felt was coming. "Nobody could have been kinder to me than those two people. They gave food, and drink, and clothing, and shelter, and, something more, they gave me the secret of the philosopher's stone; told me how it was that, though no one had left them a fortune, they came to be living there." Holding her shapely hands in front of her she kept pressing the tips of the fingers together, and then withdrawing them.