“Well,” said he.  “You can get some more tea for Machin.  Give me that.”  And he took the tray.  “No, you can keep the newspaper.”

The paper was The Daily Picture.  As he held the tray with one hand and gave the paper back to Selina with the other, his eye caught the headlines:  “West End Sensation.  Mrs. Prohack’s Pearls Pinched.”  He paled; but he was too proud a man to withdraw the paper again.  No doubt The Daily Picture would reach him through the customary channels after Machin had done with it, accompanied by the usual justifications about the newsboy being late; he could wait.

“Which is the servants’ hall,” said he.  Selina’s manner changed to positive alarm as she indicated, in the dark subterranean corridor, the door that was locked on the prisoner.  Not merely the presence of Mr. Prohack had thrilled the basement floor; there was a thrill greater even than that, and Mr. Prohack, by demanding the door of the servants’ hall was intensifying the thrill to the last degree.  The key was on the outside of the door, which he unlocked.  Within the electric light was still burning in the obscure dawn.

The prisoner, who sprang up from a chair and curtsied fearsomely at the astonishing spectacle of Mr. Prohack, was fat in a superlative degree, and her obesity gave her a middle-aged air to which she probably had no right by the almanac.  She looked quite forty, and might well have been not more than thirty.  She made a typical London figure of the nondescript industrial class.  It is inadequate to say that her shabby black-trimmed bonnet, her shabby sham-fur coat half hiding a large dubious apron, her shabby frayed black skirt, and her shabby, immense, amorphous boots,—­it is inadequate to say that these things seemed to have come immediately out of a tenth-rate pawnshop; the woman herself seemed to have come, all of a piece with her garments, out of a tenth-rate pawnshop; the entity of her was at any rate homogeneous; it sounded no discord.

She did nothing so active as to weep, but tears, obeying the law of gravity, oozed out of her small eyes, and ran in zigzags, unsummoned and unchecked, down her dark-red cheeks.

“Oh, sir!” she mumbled in a wee, scarcely articulate voice.  “I’m a respectable woman, so help me God!”

“You shall be respected,” said Mr. Prohack.  “Sit down and drink some of this tea and eat the bread-and-butter....  No!  I don’t want you to say anything just yet.  No, nothing at all.”

When she had got the tea into the cup, she poured it into the saucer and blew on it and began to drink loudly.  After two sips she plucked at a piece of bread-and-butter, conveyed it into her mouth, and before doing anything further to it, sirruped up some more tea.  And in this way she went on.  Her table manners convinced Mr. Prohack that her claim to respectability was authentic.

“And now,” said Mr. Prohack, gazing through the curtained window at the blank wall that ended above him at the edge of the pavement, so as not to embarrass her, “will you tell me why you spent the night in my area?”