“Nothing extraordinary,” I answered.  “I was only wondering how you came here.”

“I came with a friend who is very good to me.  I have only been here two days.”

“And you found your way to this place yesterday?”

“How do you know that?”

“I only guessed it.”

She turned from me, and knelt down before the inscription once more.

“Where should I go if not here?” she said.  “The friend who was better than a mother to me is the only friend I have to visit at Limmeridge.  Oh, it makes my heart ache to see a stain on her tomb!  It ought to be kept white as snow, for her sake.  I was tempted to begin cleaning it yesterday, and I can’t help coming back to go on with it to-day.  Is there anything wrong in that?  I hope not.  Surely nothing can be wrong that I do for Mrs. Fairlie’s sake?”

The old grateful sense of her benefactress’s kindness was evidently the ruling idea still in the poor creature’s mind—­the narrow mind which had but too plainly opened to no other lasting impression since that first impression of her younger and happier days.  I saw that my best chance of winning her confidence lay in encouraging her to proceed with the artless employment which she had come into the burial-ground to pursue.  She resumed it at once, on my telling her she might do so, touching the hard marble as tenderly as if it had been a sentient thing, and whispering the words of the inscription to herself, over and over again, as if the lost days of her girlhood had returned and she was patiently learning her lesson once more at Mrs. Fairlie’s knees.

“Should you wonder very much,” I said, preparing the way as cautiously as I could for the questions that were to come, “if I owned that it is a satisfaction to me, as well as a surprise, to see you here?  I felt very uneasy about you after you left me in the cab.”

She looked up quickly and suspiciously.

“Uneasy,” she repeated.  “Why?”

“A strange thing happened after we parted that night.  Two men overtook me in a chaise.  They did not see where I was standing, but they stopped near me, and spoke to a policeman on the other side of the way.”

She instantly suspended her employment.  The hand holding the damp cloth with which she had been cleaning the inscription dropped to her side.  The other hand grasped the marble cross at the head of the grave.  Her face turned towards me slowly, with the blank look of terror set rigidly on it once more.  I went on at all hazards—­ it was too late now to draw back.

“The two men spoke to the policeman,” I said, “and asked him if he had seen you.  He had not seen you; and then one of the men spoke again, and said you had escaped from his Asylum.”

She sprang to her feet as if my last words had set the pursuers on her track.

“Stop! and hear the end,” I cried.  “Stop! and you shall know how I befriended you.  A word from me would have told the men which way you had gone—­and I never spoke that word.  I helped your escape—­I made it safe and certain.  Think, try to think.  Try to understand what I tell you.”