He was neither happy nor unhappy, but in equilibrium, walking with sure steps, and the anxiety in which he had fallen asleep the night before was gone:  anxiety lest the woman should have fled, or changed her mind, or committed some act of desperation.

In Dalton Street a thin coat of yellow mud glistened on the asphalt, but even the dreariness of this neighbourhood seemed transient.  He rang the bell of the flat, the door swung open, and in the hall above a woman awaited him.  She was clad in black.

“You wouldn’t know me, would you?” she inquired.  “Say, I scarcely know myself.  I used to wear this dress at Pratt’s, with white collars and cuffs and—­well, I just put it on again.  I had it in the bottom of my trunk, and I guessed you’d like it.”

“I didn’t know you at first,” he said, and the pleasure in his face was her reward.

The transformation, indeed, was more remarkable than he could have believed possible, for respectability itself would seem to have been regained by a costume, and the abundance of her remarkable hair was now repressed.  The absence of paint made her cheeks strangely white, the hollows under the eyes darker.  The eyes themselves alone betrayed the woman of yesterday; they still burned.

“Why,” he exclaimed, looking around him, “you have been busy, haven’t you?”

“I’ve been up since six,” she told him proudly.  The flat had been dismantled of its meagre furniture, the rug was rolled up and tied, and a trunk strapped with rope was in the middle of the floor.  Her next remark brought home to him the full responsibility of his situation.  She led him to the window, and pointed to a spot among the drenched weeds and rubbish in the yard next door.  “Do you see that bottle?  That’s the first thing I did—­flung it out there.  It didn’t break,” she added significantly, “and there are three drinks in it yet.”

Once more he confined his approval to his glance.

“Now you must come and have some breakfast,” he said briskly.  “If I had thought about it I should have waited to have it with you.”

“I’m not hungry.”  In the light of his new knowledge, he connected her sudden dejection with the sight of the bottle.

“But you must eat.  You’re exhausted from all this work.  And a cup of coffee will make all the difference in the world.”

She yielded, pinning on her hat.  And he led her, holding the umbrella over her, to a restaurant in Tower Street, where a man in a white cap and apron was baking cakes behind a plate-glass window.  She drank the coffee, but in her excitement left the rest of the breakfast almost untasted.

“Say,” she asked him once, “why are you doing this?”

“I don’t know,” he answered, “except that it gives me pleasure.”

“Pleasure?”

“Yes.  It makes me feel as if I were of some use.”

She considered this.

“Well,” she observed, reviled by the coffee, “you’re the queerest minister I ever saw.”