The door was opened by a melancholy middle-aged woman servant.  I gave her my card, and asked if I could see Mrs. Catherick.  The card was taken into the front parlour, and the servant returned with a message requesting me to mention what my business was.

“Say, if you please, that my business relates to Mrs. Catherick’s daughter,” I replied.  This was the best pretext I could think of, on the spur of the moment, to account for my visit.

The servant again retired to the parlour, again returned, and this time begged me, with a look of gloomy amazement, to walk in.

I entered a little room, with a flaring paper of the largest pattern on the walls.  Chairs, tables, cheffonier, and sofa, all gleamed with the glutinous brightness of cheap upholstery.  On the largest table, in the middle of the room, stood a smart Bible, placed exactly in the centre on a red and yellow woollen mat and at the side of the table nearest to the window, with a little knitting-basket on her lap, and a wheezing, blear-eyed old spaniel crouched at her feet, there sat an elderly woman, wearing a black net cap and a black silk gown, and having slate-coloured mittens on her hands.  Her iron-grey hair hung in heavy bands on either side of her face—­her dark eyes looked straight forward, with a hard, defiant, implacable stare.  She had full square cheeks, a long, firm chin, and thick, sensual, colourless lips.  Her figure was stout and sturdy, and her manner aggressively self-possessed.  This was Mrs. Catherick.

“You have come to speak to me about my daughter,” she said, before I could utter a word on my side.  “Be so good as to mention what you have to say.”

The tone of her voice was as hard, as defiant, as implacable as the expression of her eyes.  She pointed to a chair, and looked me all over attentively, from head to foot, as I sat down in it.  I saw that my only chance with this woman was to speak to her in her own tone, and to meet her, at the outset of our interview, on her own ground.

“You are aware,” I said, “that your daughter has been lost?”

“I am perfectly aware of it.”

“Have you felt any apprehension that the misfortune of her loss might be followed by the misfortune of her death?”

“Yes.  Have you come here to tell me she is dead?”

“I have.”

“Why?”

She put that extraordinary question without the slightest change in her voice, her face, or her manner.  She could not have appeared more perfectly unconcerned if I had told her of the death of the goat in the enclosure outside.

“Why?” I repeated.  “Do you ask why I come here to tell you of your daughter’s death?”

“Yes.  What interest have you in me, or in her?  How do you come to know anything about my daughter?”

“In this way.  I met her on the night when she escaped from the Asylum, and I assisted her in reaching a place of safety.”