"I spent last night there," she said. "The ceiling came down in the next room. Besides," she added, "though possibly that may not deter you, there are two policemen there."
I saw now that it had been the cottage which she had been watching. And sure enough, in a broken shaft of sunshine which straggled out for a moment, I saw two dark figures steal towards the cottage under cover of the wall.
"Why are they there?" I said, gaping at such a strange sight. For I had been many months at Rufford, and I had never seen a policeman.
"They are lying in wait for some one," she said.
It flashed back across my mind how at luncheon that day the vicar had said that a female convict had escaped from Ipswich gaol, and had been traced to Bealings, and, it was conjectured, was lurking in the neighbourhood of Woodbridge.
I took sudden note of my companion's peculiar dark bluish clothes and shawl, and the blood rushed to my head. I knew what those garments meant. She pushed back her grizzled hair from her lined, walnut-coloured face, and we looked hard at each other.
There was no fear in her eyes, but a certain curiosity as to what I was going to do.
"If I told you they were not looking for me," she said, "I could not, under the circumstances, expect you to believe it."
I am too highly strung for this workaday world. I know it to my cost. The artistic temperament has its penalties. My doctor at Cromer often told me that I vibrated like a harp at the slightest touch. I vibrated now. Indeed, I almost sat down in the sodden track.
But unlike many of my brothers and sisters of the pen, I am capable of impulsive, even quixotic action, and I ought, in justice to myself, to mention here that I had not then read that noble book "The Treasure of Heaven," in which it will be remembered that a generous-souled woman takes in from the storm, and nurses back to health in her lowly cottage, an aged tramp who turns out to be a millionaire, and leaves her his vast fortune. I did not get the idea of acting as I am about to relate from Marie Corelli, the head of our profession, or indeed from any other writer. But I have so often been accused of taking other people's plots and ideas and sentiments, that I owe it to myself to make this clear before I go on.