I stood ringing. I thundered at the knocker.  
I beat the door with my fist.
 
An old man opened at last.
 
"Mrs. Harborough! Where is she?" The old man tried to keep me out. But he was gentle and frail¹. I forced my way past. I called and ran along a passage, trying doors that opened into the darkness.
 
At last! A room where a woman sat alone—reading by a shaded light.
 
"Who are you?" I cried out. She laid her book in her lap. "Are you Mrs. Harborough? Then come—come quickly ... I'll tell you on the way——"
 
The old woman lifted the folds of her double chin and looked at me through spectacles.
 
"You must come and help me to get Bettina...." I broke into distracted sobbing² on the name. "Bettina——! Bettina——!" I seized the lady's hand and tried to draw her out of her chair.[Pg 304]
 
But I was full of trembling. She sat there massive, calm, with a power of inert³ resistance, that made me feel I could as easily drag her house out of the Square by its knocker, as move the woman planted there in her chair.
 
Neither haste nor perturbation in the voice that asked me: "What has happened?"
 
"Not yet!" I cried out. "Nothing has happened yet! But we must be quick. Oh, God, let us be quick——"
 
The butler had followed me in and was asking something. "Yes," said the quiet voice, "pay the cabman."
 
"No!" I shrieked⁴. "Keep him! I must go back, instantly...." And through my own strange-sounding voice, hers reached me.
 
"You must see that you are quite unintelligible⁵. Sit down and collect yourself."
 
"Sit down! Isn't it enough that one woman sits still, while—while——"
 
She was putting questions.
 
I heard a reproach that seemed to fill the house: "You never came to meet us!"
 
And while the charge was ringing I felt, with anguish⁶, the injustice⁷ of it. How could one have expected this woman to come![Pg 305]
 
But she should be moved and stirred at last!
 
"I sent my maid," she was defending herself, "—only a minute or two late."
 
"The other woman was not late!"
 
"Who?"
 
I begged the butler to get a cloak for Mrs. Harborough. She was saying Bettina and I should have waited. And again that I must calm myself and tell her——
 
"Someone pretended to be you!" I hurled⁸ it at her. "She took us to a house—a place where they do worse than murder. Betty is there now——" I told her all I could pack into a few sentences.
 
"It isn't possible," my aunt said. "This is England."
 
"Come and see! Betty——" But they only thought me mad; they tortured me with questions.
 
I caught her by the arm. "God won't forgive you if you wait an instant more."
 
Oh, but she was old and unbelieving! So old, I felt she had looked on unmoved at evil since the world began.
 
But she was sending for wraps, sending messages. Still she sat there, in the heavy, square-backed chair, her hands upon her knees, her two[Pg 306] feet side by side as motionless as the footstool, her heavy shoulders high and square, her lace cap with square ends falling either side her face, like the head-dress of an Egyptian, her air of monumental calm more like a Theban statue than a living woman.
 
I turned away.
 
The figure in the chair rose up at last.
 
Oh, but slowly—slow, and stiff, and

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