The young man bowed. I bowed, and was slipping at last from my place by the stairs when, for the third time, I felt my dress twitched.
"Are you going to keep to that story?" a voice whispered in my ear. "About the young man and woman coming in the night, you know."
"Keep to it!" I whispered back, recognizing the scrub-woman, who had sidled up to me from some unknown quarter in the semi-darkness. "Why, it's true. Why shouldn't I keep to it."
A chuckle, difficult to describe but full of meaning, shook the arm of the woman as she pressed close to my side.
"Oh, you are a good one," she said. "I didn't know they made 'em so good!" And with another chuckle full of satisfaction and an odd sort of admiration I had certainly not earned, she slid away again into the darkness.
Certainly there was something in this woman's attitude towards this affair which merited attention.