“That was my idea too.”
“Come!” she said.
They walked together up the Arbat, and then the girl touched his sleeve, and turned down a narrow sidestreet, and again out of that.
“It is not far now.”
Presently she stopped in front of a dilapidated building standing back in a courtyard filled with bricks and rubbish. She opened an iron gate, and crossed the courtyard.
“You will see that we do not live in luxury, sir. You must excuse our gipsy way of life. Now we are here.”
She went down a narrow corridor smelling of bad drains, and pulled a heavy curtain aside from a doorway which had lost its door. Inside was a square room with uncarpeted boards, dimly lit by an oil lamp, and barely furnished. . . . An elderly man with a white beard and moustache sat in a low chair made out of packing-cases, and lying on a truckle bed, covered with a patchwork rug, was the lady to whom Bertram had spoken in the market-place.
“Here is Mr. Pollard, mother,” said the girl, as she held the curtain for Bertram to enter.
“How kind and good of you to come!” said the lady. “I so wished to speak to you the other day, and yet I was afraid! We have been through so many terrors that now we tremble at any unexpected thing.”
Bertram bent over the truckle bed and kissed the delicate hand that was held up to him. Some instinct of chivalry or sentiment made him pay this homage to a lady of the old régime, lying in this dirty little room, without a relic of her former state.