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come from nowhere—come, at last. What could I say? I looked again at Gentleman. My heart beat hard, like hammers in my breast. I said:
    ‘All right. I’ll do it. But for three thousand pounds, not two. And if the lady don’t care for me and sends me home, I shall want a hundred anyway, for the trouble of trying.’
    He hesitated, thinking it over. Of course, that was all a show. After a second he smiled, then he held his hand to me and I gave him mine. He pressed my fingers, and laughed.
    John scowled. ‘I’ll give you ten to one she comes back crying in a week,’ he said.
    ‘I’ll come back dressed in a velvet gown,’ I answered. ‘With gloves up to here, and a hat with a veil on, and a bag full of silver coin. And you shall have to call me miss. Won’t he, Mrs Sucksby?’
    He spat. ‘I’ll tear my own tongue out, before I do that!’
    ‘I’ll tear it out first!’ I said.
    I sound like a child. I was a child! Perhaps Mrs Sucksby was thinking that, too. For she said nothing, only sat, still gazing at me, with her hand at her soft lip. She smiled; but her face seemed troubled. I could almost have said, she was afraid.
    Perhaps she was.
    Or perhaps I only think that now, when I know what dark and fearful things were to follow.

2.
    T he bookish old man, it turned out, was called Christopher Lilly. The niece’s name was Maud. They lived west of London, out Maidenhead-way, near a village named Marlow, and in a house they called Briar. Gentleman’s plan was to send me there alone, by train, in two days’ time. He himself, he said, must stay in London for another week at least, to do the old man’s business over the bindings of his books.
    I didn’t care much for the detail of my travelling down there, and arriving at the house, all on my own. I had never been much further west before than the Cremorne Gardens, where I sometimes went with Mr Ibbs’s nephews, to watch the dancing on a Saturday night. I saw the French girl cross the river on a wire from there, and almost drop— that was something. They say she wore stockings; her legs looked bare enough to me, though. But I recall standing on Battersea Bridge as she walked her rope, and looking out, past Hammersmith, to all the countryside beyond it, that was just trees and hills and not a chimney or the spire of a church in sight—and oh! that was a very chilling thing to see. If you had said to me then, that I would one day leave the Borough, with all my pals in it, and Mrs Sucksby and Mr Ibbs, and go quite alone, to a maid’s place in a house the other side of those dark hills, I should have laughed in your face.
    But Gentleman said I must go soon, in case the lady—Miss Lilly—should spoil our plot, by accidentally taking another girl to be her servant. The day after he came to Lant Street he sat and wrote her out a letter. He said he hoped she would pardon the liberty of his writing, but he had been on a visit to his old nurse—that had been like a mother to him, when he was a boy—and he had found her quite demented with grief, over the fate of her dead sister’s daughter. Of course, the dead sister’s daughter was meant to be me: the story was, that I had been maiding for a lady who was marrying and heading off for India, and had lost my place; that I was looking out for another mistress, but was meanwhile being tempted on every side to go to the bad; and that if only some soft-hearted lady would give me the chance of a situation far away from the evils of the city—and so on.
    I said, ‘If she’ll believe bouncers like those, Gentleman, she must be even sillier than you first told us.’
    But he answered, that there were about a hundred girls between the Strand and Piccadilly, who dined very handsomely off that story, five nights a week; and if the hard swells of London could be separated from their shillings by it, then how much kinder wasn’t Miss Maud Lilly likely to be, all alone and unknowing and sad as she was, and with no-one to tell