"Don't cry, girl; there's nothing to cry at. You'll laugh at and be ashamed of yourself in the morning. I'll tell you what--I'll make an exception!--you shall have half my bed, and for the rest of the night we'll sleep together."
CHAPTER V
[A REPRESENTATIVE OF LAW AND ORDER]
The next morning, information was given to a passing policeman of the events of the night, and in the course of the day an officer came round from the local station to learn particulars. Madge received him in solitary state; she had refused Ella's offer to stop away from business to keep her company, declaring that for that day, at any rate, she would be safe from undesirable intruders.
The officer was a plain-clothes man, middle-aged, imperfectly educated, with the stolid, matter-of-fact, rather stupid-looking countenance which one is apt to find an attribute of the detective of fact, rather than fiction.
"You say you didn't see him?"
"I saw the back of him."
"Hum!" This stands for a sort of a kind of a sniff.
"Would you know him if you saw him again?"
"From the glimpse which I caught of him last night I certainly shouldn't. It was pretty dark, and he was twenty or thirty yards down the road when I first caught sight of his back."