“She is a funny one,” she said.  “Is your tea right, dearie?”

“Perfect,” said Julian.  “Is my toast right?”

“Right as ninepence, and righter.”

She munched.

“I like you,” she said.  “You’re a gentleman.”

She spoke naturally, without coquetry.  It was a fine experience for her to be treated with that thing some women never know—­respect.  She warmed under it and glistened.

“We must be friends,” Julian said.

“Pals.  Yes.  Have some more sugar?”

She jumped two lumps into his cup, and laughed quite gaily when the tea spouted over into the saucer.  And they chatted on, and fed Jessie into joy and peace.  Gradually Julian drew the conversation round to the photographs.  The lady was expansive.  She gave short histories of some of the men, summing them up with considerable shrewdness, kodaking their characters with both humour and sarcasm.  Julian and she progressed along the mantelpiece together.  Presently they arrived at the old lady with the Bible.

“And this?” Julian said.

The lady’s fund of spirits was suddenly exhausted.

“Oh, that,” she said, and a sort of strange, suppressed blush struggled up under the rouge on her face.  “Well, that’s mother.”

“I like her face.”

“Yes.  She thinks I’m dead.”

The lady turned away abruptly.

“I’ll just carry the tray down to Mrs. Brigg,” she said, and she clattered out with it, and down the stairs.

Julian heard her loudly humming a music-hall song as she went, the requiem of her dead life with the old woman who held the Bible on her knees.  When she returned, her mouth was hard and her eyes were shining ominously.  Julian was still standing by the mantelpiece.  As she came in he pointed to the photograph of Marr.

“And this?” he asked.  “Who’s this?”

The lady burst into a shrill laugh of mingled fear and cunning.

“That’s the old gentleman!”

“What do you mean?”

“What I say,—­the old gentleman, Nick, the devil, if you like it.”

“Now you are trying to take a rise out of me.”

“Not I, dear,” she said.  “That’s the devil, sure enough.”

Either the tea and toast had rendered her exuberant, or the thought of the old woman who believed her to be dead had driven her into recklessness.  She continued: 

“I’d been with him that night I met you, and I was frightened, I tell you.  I’d been mad with fright.”

“Why?  What had he done to you?”

Julian strove to conceal his eager interest under a light assumption of carelessness.

“Done!—­never mind.  It don’t do to talk about it.”

She laid her thin hand on his arm, as if impelled to be confidential.

“Do you believe in people being struck?” she said.

“Struck!  I don’t understand.”

“Struck,” she repeated superstitiously.  “Down, from up there?”