The woman laughed softly as Dawson ducked to her, scanning him with an amusement that he felt as ignominy.  But she pointed to the image dangling in his hand.

“What is that?” she asked.

Dawson laid it on the floor carefully.  “It’s a curio,” he explained.  “I was fetching it for a lady.  An idol, you know.”

The fat man burst into a hoarse laugh, and the other man spoke to Dawson.

“An’ you?” he queried.  “What you doing ‘ere, so late an’ so wet?”

“I was trying to take a short cut to the landing-stage,” Dawson replied.  “Like a silly fool, I thought I could find my way through here.  But I got lost somehow.”

The fat man laughed again.

“You come off the German steamer?” suggested the woman.

Dawson nodded.  “I came ashore with some friends,” he answered, “from the second-class.  But I left them to go back and fetch this idol, and here I am.”

The tall man who had opened the door turned to the woman.

“So we must wait a leetle longer for your frien’s,” he said.

She tossed her head sharply.

“Friends!” she exclaimed.  “Mother of God!  Would you walk about with your knives for ever?  When every day other men are taken, can you ask to go free?  Am I the wife of the Intendente?”

“No, nod the vife!” barked the stout man violently.  “But if you gan’t tell us noding better than to stop for der police to dake us, vot’s der good of you?”

The woman shrugged her shoulders, and the shawl slipped, and showed them bare and white above her bodice.

“I have done all that one could do,” she answered sullenly, with defiant eyes.  “Seven months you have done as you would, untouched.  That was through me.  Now, fools, you must take your turn—­one month, three months, six months—­who knows?—­in prison.  One carries a knife —­one goes to prison!  What would you have?”

“Gif der yong man a chair, Tonio,” said the fat man, and his companion reached Dawson a seat.  He sat on it in the middle of the floor, while they wrangled around him.  He gathered that the two men anticipated a visit from the police very shortly, and that they blamed it on the woman, who might have averted it.  Both the men accused her of their misfortune, and she faced them dauntlessly.  She tried to bring them, it seemed, to accept it as inevitable, as a thing properly attendant on them; to show that she, after all, could not change the conditions of existence.

“You stabbed the Greek,” she argued once, turning sharply on the tall man.

“Well,” he began, and she flourished her hand as an ergo.

“Life is not spending money,” she even philosophized.  “One pays for living, my friend, with work, with pain, with jail.  Here you have to pay.  I have paid for you, seven months nearly, with smiles and love.  But the price is risen.  It is your turn now.”

Dawson gazed at her fascinated.  She spoke and gesticulated with a captivating spirit.  Life brimmed in her.  As she spoke, her motions were arguments in themselves.  She put a case and demolished it with a smile; presented the alternative, left a final word unspoken, and the thing was irresistible.  Dawson, perched lonely on his chair, experienced a desire to enter the conversation.