Mrs. Tams had decided to undertake an enterprise involving extreme gallantry—­surpassing the physical.  She went downstairs and stood outside the parlour door, which was not quite shut.  Within the parlour, or throne-room, existed a beautiful and superior being, full of grace and authority, who belonged to a race quite different from her own, who was beyond her comprehension, who commanded her and kept her alive and paid money to her, who accepted her devotion casually as a right, who treated her as a soft cushion between himself and the drift and inconvenience of the world, and who occasionally, as a supreme favour, caught her a smart slap on the back, which flattered her to excess.  She went into the throne-room if she was called thither, or if she had cleansing or tidying work there; she spoke to the superior being if he spoke to her.  But she had never till then conceived the breath-taking scheme of entering the throne-room for a purpose of her own, and addressing the superior being without an invitation to do so.

Nevertheless, since by long practice she was courageous, she meant to execute the scheme.  And she began by knocking at the door.  Although Rachel had seriously warned her that for a domestic servant to knock at the parlour door was a grave sin, she simply could not help knocking.  Not to knock seemed to her wantonly sacrilegious.  Thus she knocked, and a voice told her to come in.

There was the superior being, his back to the fire and his legs apart—­formidable!

She curtsied—­another sin according to the new code.  Then she discovered that she was inarticulate.

“Well?”

Words burst from her—­

“Her’s crying her eyes out up yon, mester.”

And Mrs. Tams also snivelled.

The superior being frowned and said testily, yet not without a touch of careless toleration—­

“Oh, get away, you silly old fool of a woman!”

Mrs. Tarns got away, not entirely ill-content.

In the lobby she heard an unusual rapping on the glass of the front door, and sharply opened it to inform the late disturber that there existed a bell and a knocker for respectable people.  A shabby youth gave her a note for “Louis Fores, Esq.,” and said that there was an answer.  So that she was forced to renew the enterprise of entering the throne-room.

In another couple of minutes Louis was running upstairs.  His wife heard him, and shook in bed from excitement at the crisis which approached.  But she could never have divined the nature of the phenomenon by which the unbridgable breach was about to be closed.

“Louise!”

“Yes,” she whimpered.  Then she ventured to spy at his face through an interstice of the bedclothes, and saw thereon a most queer, white expression.

“Some one’s just brought this.  Read it.”

He gave her the note, and she deciphered it as well as she could—­

    DEAR Louis,—­If you aren’t gone to bed I want to see you
    to-night about that missing money of aunt’s.  I’ve something I
    must tell you and Rachel.  I’m at the “Three Tuns.”