"Child," she said to me, "has that man told you anything of his own affairs?"
"Only that he is in trouble, and must fly beyond seas."
"Pray God he may go quickly," she said devoutly. "I fear he is no man to be trusted."
"Yet you help him," I answered.
"I help many that I could not trust," she said with quietness; "they have the more need of help." And in truth I know that much of her good work was among those evil-doers that others shrank from.
"This man seems strong enough to help himself," I said.
"Would that he may go quickly," was all her answer. "If the means could but be found!"
Then she spoke to me with great urgency, commanding me to hold no discourse with him nor with any concerning him.
I did my best to fulfil her bidding, yet it was difficult; for he was a man who knew the world and how to take his own way in it. He contrived more than once to see me, and to pay a kind of court to me, half in jest and half in earnest; so that I was sometimes flattered and sometimes angered, and sometimes frighted.
Then other circumstances happened unexpectedly, for I had a visitor that I had never looked to see there.