It was evening, and the detective followed his friend up the dark staircase.
When they reached the barrister’s room, Williamson produced a latch key, and opened the door; the old woman who attended to this part of the chambers came blundering after them, full of exclamations of joy at seeing the barrister again.
“Light a fire,” said the barrister.
“Lor, sir, the room is as damp as can be; it ain’t fit to sit in after all these months; they wanted to break the door open, but I paid the rent regular out of the money you sent me, and I knowed, of course, as you would come back some day,” said the woman.
“I never expected to do so, or only for a day, to settle my affairs here and give up the chambers properly,” said the barrister, addressing Bales, in reply to the woman.
“Lor, sir!” said the old woman, bustling about and lighting the fire and putting the table to rights.
“We can keep the damp out,” said the barrister, “if there is any whisky left.”
“O yes, sir, plenty!” said the woman.
“Very well,” said the barrister, producing his cigar case, and in a very short time Mr. Bales sat listening to those portions of Mr. Williamson’s story with which he was not already acquainted.
The barrister’s manner was far more quiet and subdued than it was when we first made his acquaintance. All that cynicism and apparent infidelity had dropped bodily as it were out of his conversation. He was evidently quietly resigned to his lot, calmly resolved to live out the end of his days uncomplainingly. He had succeeded to a certain extent in his somewhat romantic and almost hopeless resolves to reform his miserable daughter. He did not tell Bales how and by what degrees he had worked upon her darkened mind; he said nothing of the days of patient and unflagging effort to instruct her, to excite her higher sensibilities, to animate her with a true love for the beautiful and sublime, and through the medium of nature and art to bring her to a knowledge of the divine blessings of the Christian faith and hope. It was a plain unvarnished story which the barrister told his friend the detective. Whatever may have been the result of the father’s endeavour to change the perverted nature of his singularly-discovered child, her career was at an end—she died of a fever in a French convent, where the barrister had placed her, by her own desire; and Mr. Williamson had left France only the day before the detective met him after the burial of his daughter, upon whose tomb he had inscribed those words of the second commandment, which he had written down in that memorable epistle to Paul Somerton.