Newman looked at his visitor very gratefully; then he held out his hand and shook hers.  “Thank you,” he said.  “If any one can get in, I will.”  A moment later Mrs. Bread proposed, deferentially, to retire, but he checked her and put a lighted candle into her hand.  “There are half a dozen rooms there I don’t use,” he said, pointing through an open door.  “Go and look at them and take your choice.  You can live in the one you like best.”  From this bewildering opportunity Mrs. Bread at first recoiled; but finally, yielding to Newman’s gentle, reassuring push, she wandered off into the dusk with her tremulous taper.  She remained absent a quarter of an hour, during which Newman paced up and down, stopped occasionally to look out of the window at the lights on the Boulevard, and then resumed his walk.  Mrs. Bread’s relish for her investigation apparently increased as she proceeded; but at last she reappeared and deposited her candlestick on the chimney-piece.

“Well, have you picked one out?” asked Newman.

“A room, sir?  They are all too fine for a dingy old body like me.  There isn’t one that hasn’t a bit of gilding.”

“It’s only tinsel, Mrs. Bread,” said Newman.  “If you stay there a while it will all peel off of itself.”  And he gave a dismal smile.

“Oh, sir, there are things enough peeling off already!” rejoined Mrs. Bread, with a head-shake.  “Since I was there I thought I would look about me.  I don’t believe you know, sir.  The corners are most dreadful.  You do want a housekeeper, that you do; you want a tidy Englishwoman that isn’t above taking hold of a broom.”

Newman assured her that he suspected, if he had not measured, his domestic abuses, and that to reform them was a mission worthy of her powers.  She held her candlestick aloft again and looked around the salon with compassionate glances; then she intimated that she accepted the mission, and that its sacred character would sustain her in her rupture with Madame de Bellegarde.  With this she curtsied herself away.

She came back the next day with her worldly goods, and Newman, going into his drawing-room, found her upon her aged knees before a divan, sewing up some detached fringe.  He questioned her as to her leave-taking with her late mistress, and she said it had proved easier than she feared.  “I was perfectly civil, sir, but the Lord helped me to remember that a good woman has no call to tremble before a bad one.”

“I should think so!” cried Newman.  “And does she know you have come to me?”

“She asked me where I was going, and I mentioned your name,” said Mrs. Bread.

“What did she say to that?”

“She looked at me very hard, and she turned very red.  Then she bade me leave her.  I was all ready to go, and I had got the coachman, who is an Englishman, to bring down my poor box and to fetch me a cab.  But when I went down myself to the gate I found it closed.  My lady had sent orders to the porter not to let me pass, and by the same orders the porter’s wife—­she is a dreadful sly old body—­had gone out in a cab to fetch home M. de Bellegarde from his club.”