“You ain’t got a horse?”

“No.”

“Then how do you come here?”

“I walked.”

If this sharpened her suspicions, it sharpened her fear also.  She put one foot on the lowest step of the stairs.

“Be off with you, Mr. Donnegally, or whatever your outlandish name is.  You’ll get nothing here.  What brings you—­”

A door closed and a footstep sounded lightly on the floor above.  And Donnegan, already alert in the strange atmosphere of this house, gave back a pace so as to get an honest wall behind him.  He noted that the step was quick and small, and preparing himself to meet a wisp of manhood—­which, for that matter, was the type he was most inclined to fear—­Donnegan kept a corner glance upon the old woman at the foot of the stairs and steadily surveyed the shadows at the head of the rise.

Out of that darkness a foot slipped; not even a boy’s foot—­a very child’s.  The shock of it made Donnegan relax his caution for an instant, and in that instant she came into the reach of the light.  It was a wretched light at best, for it came from a lamp with smoky chimney which the old hag carried, and at the raising and lowering of her hand the flame jumped and died in the throat of the chimney and set the hall awash with shadows.  Falling away to a point of yellow, the lamp allowed the hall to assume a certain indefinite dignity of height and breadth and calm proportions; but when the flame rose Donnegan could see the broken balusters of the balustrade, the carpet, faded past any design and worn to rattiness, wall paper which had rotted or dried away and hung in crisp tatters here and there, and on the ceiling an irregular patch from which the plaster had fallen and exposed the lathwork.  But at the coming of the girl the old woman had turned, and as she did the flame tossed up in the lamp and Donnegan could see the newcomer distinctly.

Once before his heart had risen as it rose now.  It had been the fag end of a long party, and Donnegan, rousing from a drunken sleep, staggered to the window.  Leaning there to get the freshness of the night air against his hot face, he had looked up, and saw the white face of the moon going up the sky; and a sudden sense of the blackness and loathing against the city had come upon Donnegan, and the murky color of his own life; and when he turned away from the window he was sober.  And so it was that he now stared up at the girl.  At her breast she held a cloak together with one hand and the other hand touched the railing of the stairs.  He saw one foot suspended for the next step, as though the sight of him kept her back in fear.  To the miserable soul of Donnegan she seemed all that was lovely, young, and pure; and her hair, old gold in the shadow and pale gold where the lamp struck it, was to Donnegan like a miraculous light about her face.

Indeed, that little pause was a great and awful moment.  For considering that Donnegan, who had gone through his whole life with his eyes ready either to mock or hate, and who had rarely used his hand except to make a fist of it; Donnegan who had never, so far as is known, had a companion; who had asked the world for action, not kindness; this Donnegan now stood straight with his back against the wall, and poured out the story of his wayward life to a mere slip of a girl.