So small was the result of all these preliminaries.
“You mean,” said I, “that if I write to your mistress, you will convey the letter? Alas! I have written before and she would not even receive my writing. Oh! can you not get me speech of her? I conjure you by the love you bear her, let me see her but for a few minutes.”
The woman fixed me for a second with a startled wondering eye, opened her mouth as if to speak, but immediately clapped her hand to it as if to restrain the words. Then, with a passion of entreaty that it was impossible to withstand, she pointed to the paper and cried once more, “Write.”
And so I seemed ever destined to communicate with my wife from strange places and by strange messengers.
With a trembling hand and a brain in a whirl I wrote—I hardly know what: a wild, passionate, reproachful appeal, setting forth in incoherent words all I had done and suffered, all my desire, all my faithful love. When I looked up at length I found the black eyes still watching me with the same inscrutable fierceness. I was going to trust my life and its hopes to this woman, and for a moment I hesitated. But at the same instant there was some noise without, and snatching the letter unfinished from before me, she thrust it into her bosom, folded her cloak across it, and stooping close to me demanded in her breathless undertone:
“Where do you live?”
Mechanically I told her, adding: “Ask for M. Desberger.”
She nodded with swift comprehension, unbolted the barred front door of the little shop, and drew me hastily out by the back, along a close, flagged passage, leaving an irate customer hammering and clamouring for admittance.
We proceeded through a small yard into another alley, and here she halted a second, still detaining me by my cloak.