or her child, and so ignorant of the perfect freedom that political exiles could count upon in England. Then, said I, what expectation is there that she will admit me, an absolute stranger to her, who may be employed by the police for anything she knows to the contrary? The answer was: Of course that has been thought of. But you have only to send up your name, which, in the certainty that you would have no objection, has been communicated to her already. Her own name, in England, is Madame Vernet.

It was a Saturday evening in November, the air thick with darkness and a drizzling rain, the streets black and shining where lamplight fell upon the mud on the paths and the pools in the roadway, when I found my way to King's Cross on this small errand of kindness. King's Cross is a most unlovely purlieu at its best, which must be in the first dawn of a summer day, when the innocence of morning smiles along its squalid streets, and the people of the place, who cannot be so wretched as they look, are shut within their poor and furtive homes. On a foul November night nothing can be more miserable, more melancholy. One or two great thoroughfares were crowded with foot-passengers who bustled here and there about their Saturday marketings, under the light that flared from the shops and the stalls that lined the roadway. Spreading on every hand from these thoroughfares, with their noisy trafficking so dreadfully eager and small, was a maze of streets built to be respectable but now run down into the forlorn poverty which is all for concealment without any rational hope of success. It was to one of these that I was directed—a narrow silent little street of three-storey houses, with two families at least in every one of them.

Arrived at No. 17, I was admitted by a child after long delay, and by her conducted to a room at the top of the house. No voice responded to the knock at the room door, and none to the announcement of the visitor's name; but before I entered I was aware of a sound which, though it was only what may be heard in the grill-room of any coffee-house at luncheon time, made me feel very guilty and ashamed. For the last ten minutes I had been gradually sinking under the fear of intrusion—of intrusion upon grief, and not less upon the wretched little secrets of poverty which pride is so fain to conceal; and now these splutterings of a frying-pan foundered me quite. What worse intrusion could there be than to come prying in upon the cooking of some poor little meal?

Too much embarrassed to make the right apology (which, to be right, would have been without any embarrassment at all) I entered the room, in which everything could be seen in one straightforward glance: the little square table in the centre, with its old green cover and the squat lamp on it, the two chairs, the dingy half carpet, the bed wherein a child lay asleep in a lovely flush of colour, and the pale woman with a still face, and with the eyes that are said to resemble agates, standing before the hearth. Under the dark cloud of her hair she looked the very picture of Suffering—Suffering too proud to complain and too tired to speak. Beautiful as the lines of her face were, it was white as ashes and spoke their meaning; but nothing had yet tamed the upspringing nobility of her tall, slight, and yet imperious form.

Receiving me with the very least appearance of curiosity or any other kind of interest, but yet with something of proud constraint (which I attributed too much, perhaps, to the untimely frying-pan), she waved her hand toward the farther chair of the two, and asked to be excused from giving me her attention for a moment. By that she evidently meant that otherwise her supper would be spoiled. It is not everything that can be left to cook unattended; and since this poor little supper was a piece of fish scarce bigger than her hand, it was all the more likely to spoil and the less could be spared in damage. So I quietly took my seat in a position which more naturally commanded the view out of window than of the cooking operations, and waited to be again addressed.

On the mantel-board a noisy little American clock ticked as if its mission was to hurry time rather than to measure it, the frying-pan fizzed and bubbled without any abatement of its usual habit or any sense of compunction, now and then the child tossed upon the bed from one pretty attitude to another; and that was all that could be heard, for Madame Vernet's movements were as silent as the movements of a shadow. In almost any part of that small room she could be seen without direct looking; but at a moment when she seemed struck into a yet deeper silence, and because of it, I ventured to turn upon her more than half an eye. Standing rigidly still, she was staring at the door in an intensity of listening that transfigured her. But the door was closed, and I with the best of hearing directed to the same place could detect no new sound: indeed, I dare swear that there was none. It was merely accidental that just at this moment the child, with another toss of the lovely black head, opened her eyes wide; but it deepened the impressiveness of the scene when her mother, seeing the little one awake, placed a finger on her own lips as she advanced nearer to the door. The gesture was for silence, and it was obeyed as if in understood fear. But still there was nothing to be heard without, unless it were a push of soft drizzle against the window-panes. And this Madame Vernet herself seemed to think when, after a little while, she turned back to the fire—her eyes mere agates again which had been all ablaze.

Stooping to the fender, she had now got her fish into one warm plate, and had covered it with another, and had placed it on the broad old-fashioned hob of the grate to keep hot (as I surmised) while she spoke with and got rid of me, when knocking was heard at the outer door, a pair of hasty feet came bounding up the stair, careless of noise, and in flashed a splendid radiant creature of a man in a thin summer coat, and literally drenched to the skin.

It was Monsieur Vernet, whose real name ended in ieff. By daring ingenuity, by a long chain of connivance yet more hazardous, by courage, effrontery, and one or two miraculous strokes of good fortune, he had escaped from the fortress to which he had been conveyed in secret and without the least spark of hope that he would ever be released. For many months no one but himself and his jailers knew whether he was alive or dead: his friends inclined to think him the one thing or the other according to the brightness or the gloominess of the hour. Smuggled into Germany, and running thence into Belgium, he had landed in England the night before; and walking the whole distance to London, with an interval of four hours' sleep in a cartshed, he contrived to bring home nearly all of the four shillings with which he started.

But these particulars, it will be understood, I did not learn till afterwards. For that evening my visit was at an end from the moment (the first of his appearance) when Vernet seized his wife in his arms with a partial resemblance to murder. Unobserved, I placed my small packet on the table behind the lamp, and then slipped out; but not without a last view of that affecting domestic interior, which showed me those two people in a relaxed embrace while they made me a courteous salute in response to another which was all awkwardness, their little daughter standing up on the bed in her night-gown, patiently yet eagerly waiting to be noticed by her father. In all likelihood she had not to wait long.

This was the beginning of my