"That's a promise, mind," said she at last. "And it's a promise you wouldn't mind giving, I think, if you believed in half I've gone through."
She took a key from her pocket, unlocked the outer door and set it ajar.
"Will that do for you?" asked she.
"Yes, that's all right."
She took up the candle, which she had put on a shelf while she knelt to find out whether he was hurt, and crossing the brick floor with rapid, rather stealthy steps, she put her fingers on the latch of the inner door.
"Keep close!" whispered she.
Max obeyed. He kept so close that the girl's soft hair, which was of the ash-fair color so common in English blondes who have been flaxen-headed in their childhood, almost touched his face. She opened the door and entered what was evidently the back room of the deserted shop.
A dark room it must have been, even in broadest daylight. Opposite to the door by which they had entered was one which was glazed in the upper half; this evidently led into the shop itself, although the old red curtain which hung over the glass panes hid the view of what was beyond. There was a little fireplace, in which were the burnt-out ashes of a recent fire. There was a deal table in the middle of the room, and a cloth of a common pattern of blue and red check lay in a heap on the floor. A couple of plain Windsor chairs, and a third with arms and a cushion, a hearth-rug, a fender and fire-irons, completed the furniture of the room.
And the one window, a small one, which looked out upon the wharf, in a corner formed by the outhouse on the one side and a shed on the other, was carefully boarded up.
Grimly desolate the dark, bare room looked, small as it was; and a couple of rats, which scurried over the floor as Max entered, added a suggestion of other horrors to the deserted room. The girl had managed to get behind Max, and he turned sharply with a suspicion that she meant to shut him into the room by himself.