That evening Rachel sat alone in the parlour, reclining on the Chesterfield over the Signal.  She had picked up the Signal in order to read about captured burglars, but the paper contained not one word on the subject, or on any other subject except football.  The football season had commenced in splendour, and it happened to be the football edition of the Signal that the paper-boy had foisted upon Mrs. Maldon’s house.  Despite repeated and positive assurances from Mrs. Maldon that she wanted the late edition and not the football edition on Saturday nights, the football edition was usually delivered, because the paper-boy could not conceive that any customer could sincerely not want the football edition.  Rachel was glancing in a torpid condition at the advertisements of the millinery and trimming shops.

She would have been more wakeful could she have divined the blow which she had escaped a couple of hours before.  Between five and six o’clock, when she was upstairs in the large bedroom, Mrs. Maldon had said to her, “Rachel—­” and stopped.  “Yes, Mrs. Maldon,” she had replied.  And Mrs. Maldon had said, “Nothing.”  Mrs. Maldon had desired to say, but in words carefully chosen:  “Rachel, I’ve never told you that Louis Fores began life as a bank clerk, and was dismissed for stealing money.  And even since then his conduct has not been blameless.”  Mrs. Maldon had stopped because she could not find the form of words which would permit her to impart to her paid companion this information about her grand-nephew.  Mrs. Maldon, when the moment for utterance came, had discovered that she simply could not do it, and all her conscientious regard for Rachel and all her sense of duty were not enough to make her do it.  So that Rachel, unsuspectingly, had been spared a tremendous emotional crisis.  By this time she had grown nearly accustomed to the fact of the disappearance of the money.  She had completely recovered from the hysteria caused by old Batchgrew’s attack, and was, indeed, in the supervening calm, very much ashamed of it.

She meant to doze, having firmly declined the suggestion of Mrs. Tams that she should go to bed at seven o’clock, and she was just dropping the paper when a tap on the window startled her.  She looked in alarm at the window, where the position of one of the blinds proved the correctness of Mrs. Maldon’s secret theory that if Mrs. Maldon did not keep a personal watch on the blinds they would never be drawn properly.  Eight inches of black pane showed, and behind that dark transparency something vague and pale.  She knew it must be the hand of Louis Fores that had tapped, and she could feel her heart beating.  She flew on tiptoe to the front door, and cautiously opened it.  At the same moment Louis sprang from the narrow space between the street railings and the bow window on to the steps.  He raised his hat with the utmost grace.

“I saw your head over the arm of the Chesterfield,” he said in a cheerful, natural low voice.  “So I tapped on the glass.  I thought if I knocked at the door I might waken the old lady.  How are things to-night?”