The woman waited a moment to compose herself, then reached out and pulled the bell-handle. There was a jangle of wires, and somewhere at the back of the house a bell tinkled. The musician stopped in the middle of a bar, and there was silence for a few moments. Then she heard a door opened, and a shrill feminine voice shouted—
"Liz!"
Shuffling footsteps approached the door, a chain was unfastened, and the catch pulled back. Framed in the aperture stood a servant girl, small in stature, and of a dirtiness unbelievable. This presumably was Liz.
"I see you have a card in the window——"
"Rooms, eh, mum? Come inside, will yer?"
The small domestic stood aside to allow Anna to pass into the hall, then carefully wiping her hands on the torn square of coarse sacking which constituted her apron, Liz tapped at a door, and, pushing it open, motioned the visitor to walk in. Anna Paluda did so, and found herself in the apartment that contained the piano.
The room showed traces of a glory that had long departed. The furniture for the most part had been good, and was of that peculiar comfortless family of horsehair and mahogany with which the mid-Victorian epoch was blessed. There were a few pictures on the wall, one or two of which looked as though they might prove valuable could one penetrate beneath the grime with which they were covered.
There was an oval table in the centre of the room, from which the cloth had evidently been hurriedly cleared at the visitor's ring. Anna could see its crumpled dirtiness peeping from a drawer in the sideboard into which it had been hurriedly thrust. Glimpses of crockery showed beneath the shabby sofa, and over all was the same objectionable odour of meals which Anna had noticed even in the hall.
The person who rose from an arm-chair by the fire, and advanced a little to meet her, fitted the room to a nicety. She, too, was mid-Victorian, and, like her surroundings, had once been handsome. Her faded tea-gown was trimmed with still more faded lace, and faded ribbons nodded wearily in her faded cap.
Her face was pale and thin and worn, but there was a little smile which came into her pale blue eyes as she guessed Anna's errand.