said his visitor, whose tone of gentleness was now charged with deliberation.
"Then how and why do you dare to come here?" cried Northcote.
"I bring you my thanks," she said, with a sudden consummate transition to humility. "I bring the gratitude of an outcast to him who has delivered her from a deeper shame than any she has suffered."
At first the bewilderment of the advocate would not yield; the revelation of the last creature in the world he looked to see in his attic had seemed to arrest his nature. But hardly had she rendered him her homage with somewhat of the sombre dignity of one who seeks by suffering to efface her stains, than the old devouring curiosity of two evenings previously returned to him. In the prison he had not seen her face; in the dock he had not permitted his eyes once to stray towards her. She was engraved in the tablets of his imagination as a foul and sordid creature, dead to feeling, yet susceptible of the loss of freedom, horrified by the too definite thought of a barbarous doom; yet over and above everything a denizen of the gutter, wretched, stupid, and unclean. It was amazing to see her stand before him in this frank guise.
Peering at her through the subdued flames of the fire and the lamp, he saw that she had contrived to inhabit her stains in a kind of chastity. It was a trick of her calling, perhaps; yet if trick it was, it was subtle, consummate, and complete. As far as his eyes could pierce the texture of her secrecy, her face was that of a woman of forty. It was pale and unembellished; the cheeks were wan; the features,
