Her eyes went up to the ceiling, like the child’s when it thinks of heaven.

“Was he?” Julian asked.

She nodded, pursing her red lips.

“That’s what I think.  It came so sudden.  Just when I was going to scream somethin’ seemed to come over him, like madness it was.  He seemed listening.  Then he says, ‘Now—­now!’ And he seemed goin’ right off.  He stared at me and didn’t seem to know me.  Lord, I was blue with it, I tell you, dear!  I was that frightened I just left him and bunked for it, and never said a word to anybody.  I ran downstairs and got out of the house, and I daren’t go home.  So I just walked about till I met you.”

She sighed.

“I did enjoy that coffee, I tell you straight, but when you began about seein’ things, I couldn’t stow it.  My nerves was shook.  So off I trotted again.”

Julian put a question to her.

“Do you know what has become of him?”

“Not I. He’ll never get in here again.  Mrs. Brigg won’t let him.  She never could abide him.”

She shook her shoulders in an irrepressible shudder.

“I wish he was dead,” she said.  “I never go out but what I’m afraid I shall meet him, or come back late but what I think I shall find him standin’ against the street door.  I wish he was dead.”

“I knew him.  He is dead.”

She looked at him, at first questioning, then awe-stricken.

“Then he was struck?  Lord!”

Her red mouth gaped.

“It was in the papers,” Julian said, “At the European Hotel.”

“That was the place.  Lord!  I never see the papers.  Dead is he?  I am glad.”

Her relief was obvious, yet almost shocking, and Julian could not question her good faith.  She had certainly not known.  He longed to find out more about her relations with Marr, and his treatment of her, but she shied away from the subject.  Obviously she really loathed and detested the remembrance of him.

“But why do you keep his photograph?” Julian asked at last.

The lady seemed puzzled.

“I dunno,” she said at last.  “I don’t seem as if I could burn it.  But if he is gone—­dead, I mean—­really—­”

“He is.”

“I know.”

She sat thoughtfully.  Then she said: 

“He didn’t look a fellow to die.  It seems funny.  No; he didn’t look it.”

And then she dropped the subject, and nothing would induce her to return to it.  Presently they heard a church clock strike.  It chimed seven.  Julian was astonished to find that time had gone so quickly.

“I must be going,” he said.

The lady looked at him with an odd, half-impudent, half-girlish, and wistful scrutiny.

“I say,” she began, and stopped.

“Yes?”

“I say—­why ever did you come?”

The short question that expressed her wondering curiosity might well have driven any thoughtful man into tears.  And Julian, young and careless as he often was, felt something of the terror and the pain enshrined in it.  But he did not let her see this.