“In that case,” she said, “I think I know something that will suit you exactly.”

It was a quiet boarding establishment in Bloomsbury—­comfortable house, reasonable terms, and, above all, perfectly respectable.  In fact, it was kept by her own sister, and if I liked she would take me along in her cab and drop me at the door.  Should she?

Looking back at that moment I cannot but wonder that after what I had heard I did not fear discovery.  But during the silence of the last hour I had been feeling more than ever weak and helpless, so that when my companion offered me a shelter in that great, noisy, bewildering city in which I had intended to hide myself, but now feared I might be submerged and lost, with a willing if not a cheerful heart I accepted.

Half an hour afterwards our cab drew up in a street off Russell Square at a rather grimy-looking house which stood at the corner of another and smaller square that was shut off by an iron railing.

The door was opened by a young waiter of sixteen or seventeen years, who was wearing a greasy dress-suit and a soiled shirt front.

My companion pushed into the hall, I followed her, and almost at the same moment a still larger and perhaps grosser woman than my friend, with the same features and complexion, came out of a room to the left with, a serviette in her hand.

“Sophie!”

“Jane!” cried my companion, and pointing to me she said: 

“I’ve brought you a new boarder.”

Then followed a rapid account of where she had met me, who and what I was, and why I had come up to London.

“I’ve promised you’ll take her in and not charge her too much, you know.”

“Why, no, certainly not,” said the sister.

At the next moment the boy waiter was bringing, my trunk into the house on his shoulder and my travelling companion was bidding me good-bye and saying she would look me up later.

When the door was closed I found the house full of the smell of hot food, chiefly roast beef and green vegetables, and I could hear the clink of knives and forks and the clatter of dishes in the room the landlady had come from.

“You’d like to go up to your bedroom at once, wouldn’t you?” she said.

We went up two flights of stairs covered with rather dirty druggeting, along a corridor that had a thin strip of linoleum, and finally up a third flight that was bare to the boards, until we came to a room which seemed to be at the top of the house and situated in its remotest corner.

It was a very small apartment, hardly larger than the room over the hall at home in which Aunt Bridget had made me sleep when I was a child, and it was nearly as cold and cheerless.

The wall-paper, which had once been a flowery pink, was now pale and patternless; the Venetian blind over the window (which looked out on the smaller square) had lost one of its cords and hung at an irregular angle; there was a mirror over the mantelpiece with the silvering much mottled, and a leather-covered easy chair whereof the spring was broken and the seat heavily indented.