“’Tis curious,” said he.  “And yet I thought so at the time!”

My guardian asked him what he meant.

“Why, sir,” he answered, “when my ill fortune took me to the dead man’s staircase on the night of his murder, I saw a shape so like Miss Summerson’s go by me in the dark that I had half a mind to speak to it.”

For an instant I felt such a shudder as I never felt before or since and hope I shall never feel again.

“It came downstairs as I went up,” said the trooper, “and crossed the moonlighted window with a loose black mantle on; I noticed a deep fringe to it.  However, it has nothing to do with the present subject, excepting that Miss Summerson looked so like it at the moment that it came into my head.”

I cannot separate and define the feelings that arose in me after this; it is enough that the vague duty and obligation I had felt upon me from the first of following the investigation was, without my distinctly daring to ask myself any question, increased, and that I was indignantly sure of there being no possibility of a reason for my being afraid.

We three went out of the prison and walked up and down at some short distance from the gate, which was in a retired place.  We had not waited long when Mr. and Mrs. Bagnet came out too and quickly joined us.

There was a tear in each of Mrs. Bagnet’s eyes, and her face was flushed and hurried.  “I didn’t let George see what I thought about it, you know, miss,” was her first remark when she came up, “but he’s in a bad way, poor old fellow!”

“Not with care and prudence and good help,” said my guardian.

“A gentleman like you ought to know best, sir,” returned Mrs. Bagnet, hurriedly drying her eyes on the hem of her grey cloak, “but I am uneasy for him.  He has been so careless and said so much that he never meant.  The gentlemen of the juries might not understand him as Lignum and me do.  And then such a number of circumstances have happened bad for him, and such a number of people will be brought forward to speak against him, and Bucket is so deep.”

“With a second-hand wiolinceller.  And said he played the fife.  When a boy,” Mr. Bagnet added with great solemnity.

“Now, I tell you, miss,” said Mrs. Bagnet; “and when I say miss, I mean all!  Just come into the corner of the wall and I’ll tell you!”

Mrs. Bagnet hurried us into a more secluded place and was at first too breathless to proceed, occasioning Mr. Bagnet to say, “Old girl!  Tell ’em!”

“Why, then, miss,” the old girl proceeded, untying the strings of her bonnet for more air, “you could as soon move Dover Castle as move George on this point unless you had got a new power to move him with.  And I have got it!”

“You are a jewel of a woman,” said my guardian.  “Go on!”

“Now, I tell you, miss,” she proceeded, clapping her hands in her hurry and agitation a dozen times in every sentence, “that what he says concerning no relations is all bosh.  They don’t know of him, but he does know of them.  He has said more to me at odd times than to anybody else, and it warn’t for nothing that he once spoke to my Woolwich about whitening and wrinkling mothers’ heads.  For fifty pounds he had seen his mother that day.  She’s alive and must be brought here straight!”