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?”

Rachel fully expected an affirmative.  She was prepared for that opinion now from all the world; but for once a surprise was in store for her.  The pale woman shifted her eyes, then raised them doggedly, and the look in them brought a sudden glow to Rachel’s heart.

“No, I don’t think that, and never did,” said the one independent witness for the defence.  “But others do, and I am too near where it happened; it might empty my house and keep it empty.”

Rachel seized her hand.

“Never mind, never mind,” she whispered.  “It is better, ten thousand times, that you should believe in me, that any woman should!  Thank you, and God bless you, for that!”

She was turning away, when she faced about upon the steps, gazing past the woman who believed in her, along the passage beyond, an unspoken question beneath the tears in her eyes.

“He is not here,” said the landlady, quickly.

“But he did get over it?”

“So we hope; but he was at death’s door that morning, and for days and weeks.  Now he’s abroad again—­I’m sure I don’t know where.”

Rachel said good-night, and this time the door not only shut before she had time to change her mind again, but she heard the bolts shot as she reached the pavement.  The fact did not strike her.  She was thinking for a moment of the innocent young foreigner who had brought matters to a crisis between her husband and herself.  On the whole she was glad that he was not in England—­yet there would have been one friend.

And now her own case was really desperate; it was late at night; she was famished and worn out in body and mind, nor could she see the slightest prospect of a lodging for the night.

And that she would have had in the condemned cell, with food and warmth and rest, and the blessed certainty of a speedy issue out of all her afflictions.

It was a bitter irony, after all, this acquittal!

There was but one place for her now.  She would perish there of cold and horror; but she might buy something to eat, and take it with her; and at least she could rest, and would be alone, in the empty house, the house of misery and murder, that was yet the one shelter that she knew of in all London.