I could only stare helplessly at her.
"But you are not the woman who escaped last October?" I stammered at last.
"Yes," she said pathetically, "I am. Who else should I be? What do you want with me?"
But I was speechless. It was all so unexpected, so inexplicable. I have often thought since how much stranger fact is than fiction. The more interested one is in life and in one's fellow-creatures the more surprises there are in store for one. With every year I live my sense of wonder increases, and with it my realisation of my own ignorance. As I stared amazedly at her, a change came over her face. She looked at me almost with eagerness.
"You didn't take me for 'er, did you?" she said hurriedly. "'Er as 'elped me. Did you know 'er? She ain't copped, is she? Don't tell me as she's copped too."
"I thought you were her," I said. "I don't know what I thought. I don't understand it."
"She found me on a dirty night," she said, "in a tumbledown cottage. I'd never seen her afore. But she crep' in and found me, and tole me there was a watch kep' for me at Woodbridge. And she changed clothes with me, so as to give me a bit of a chance. Mine was fair stiff with mud, for I'd laid in a wet ditch till night, but they showed the blasted colour for all that. And she give me all she had on her—her clothes, and a bite of bread and bacon, and two pence. And it wasn't as if we was pals. I'd never seen her afore. She stuck at nothing, and she only larfed at the risk, for they'd have shut her up for certain if they'd caught her. She said she'd manage some'ow. And she 'eartened me up, and put me on the road for Wickham, and she said she'd dror away the pursoot by hiding the prison clothes somewhere in the opsit direction where they could be found easy by the first fool."
"She did it," I said.
"And how did she spare 'em? She'd nuthin' but them."
"I gave her some more. If she had been my own sister I could not have done more for her."