Then they turned into the Rue Delambre, and Tommy halted them in the deep obscurity in front of another of those huge black doors which throughout Paris seemed to guard the secrets of individual life.  An automobile was waiting close by.  A little door in the huge one clicked and yielded, and they climbed over a step into black darkness.

“Thompkins!” called Miss Thompkins loudly to the black darkness, to reassure the drowsy concierge in his hidden den, shutting the door with a bang behind them; and, groping for the hands of the others, she dragged them forward stumbling.

“I never have a match,” she said.

They blundered up tenebrous stairs.

“We’re just passing my door,” said Tommy.  “Nick’s is higher up.”

Then a perpendicular slit of light showed itself—­and a portal slightly open could be distinguished.

“I shall quit here,” said Tommy.  “You go right in.”

“You aren’t leaving us?” exclaimed Miss Ingate in alarm.

“I won’t go in,” Tommy persisted in a quiet satiric tone.  “I’ll leave my door open below, and see you when you come down.”

She could be heard descending.

“Why, I guess they’re here,” said a voice, Nick’s, within, and the door was pulled wide open.

“My legs are all of a tremble!” muttered Miss Ingate.

Nick’s studio seemed larger than reality because of its inadequate illumination.  On a small paint-stained table in the centre was an oil-lamp beneath a round shade that had been decorated by some artist’s hand with a series of reclining women in many colours.  This lamp made a moon in the midnight of the studio, but it was a moon almost without rays; the shade seemed to imprison the light, save that which escaped from its superior orifice.  Against the table stood a tall thin woman in black.  Her face was lit by the rays escaping upward; a pale, firm, bland face, with rather prominent cheeks, loose grey hair above, surmounted by a toque.  The dress was dark, and the only noticeable feature of it was that the sleeves were finished in white linen; from these the hands emerged calm and veined under the lampshade; in one of them a pair of gloves were clasped.  On the table lay a thin mantle.

At the back of the studio there sat another woman, so engloomed that no detail of her could be distinguished.

“As I was saying,” the tall upright woman resumed as soon as Miss Ingate and Audrey had been introduced.  “Betty Burke is in prison.  She got six weeks this morning.  She may never come out again.  Almost her last words from the dock were that you, Miss Nickall, should be asked to go to London to look after Mrs. Burke, and perhaps to take Betty’s place in other ways.  She said that her mother preferred you to anybody else, and that she was sure you would come.  Shall you?”