“Help me up,” I said.  “You’re late for dinner, Rosanna—­and I have come to fetch you in.”

“You, Mr. Betteredge!” says she.

“They told Nancy to fetch you,” I said.  “But thought you might like your scolding better, my dear, if it came from me.”

Instead of helping me up, the poor thing stole her hand into mine, and gave it a little squeeze.  She tried hard to keep from crying again, and succeeded—­for which I respected her.  “You’re very kind, Mr. Betteredge,” she said.  “I don’t want any dinner to-day—­let me bide a little longer here.”

“What makes you like to be here?” I asked.  “What is it that brings you everlastingly to this miserable place?”

“Something draws me to it,” says the girl, making images with her finger in the sand.  “I try to keep away from it, and I can’t.  Sometimes,” says she in a low voice, as if she was frightened at her own fancy, “sometimes, Mr. Betteredge, I think that my grave is waiting for me here.”

“There’s roast mutton and suet-pudding waiting for you!” says I.  “Go in to dinner directly.  This is what comes, Rosanna, of thinking on an empty stomach!” I spoke severely, being naturally indignant (at my time of life) to hear a young woman of five-and-twenty talking about her latter end!

She didn’t seem to hear me:  she put her hand on my shoulder, and kept me where I was, sitting by her side.

“I think the place has laid a spell on me,” she said.  “I dream of it night after night; I think of it when I sit stitching at my work.  You know I am grateful, Mr. Betteredge—­you know I try to deserve your kindness, and my lady’s confidence in me.  But I wonder sometimes whether the life here is too quiet and too good for such a woman as I am, after all I have gone through, Mr. Betteredge—­after all I have gone through.  It’s more lonely to me to be among the other servants, knowing I am not what they are, than it is to be here.  My lady doesn’t know, the matron at the reformatory doesn’t know, what a dreadful reproach honest people are in themselves to a woman like me.  Don’t scold me, there’s a dear good man.  I do my work, don’t I?  Please not to tell my lady I am discontented—­I am not.  My mind’s unquiet, sometimes, that’s all.”  She snatched her hand off my shoulder, and suddenly pointed down to the quicksand.  “Look!” she said “Isn’t it wonderful? isn’t it terrible?  I have seen it dozens of times, and it’s always as new to me as if I had never seen it before!”

I looked where she pointed.  The tide was on the turn, and the horrid sand began to shiver.  The broad brown face of it heaved slowly, and then dimpled and quivered all over.  “Do you know what it looks like to me?” says Rosanna, catching me by the shoulder again.  “It looks as if it had hundreds of suffocating people under it—­all struggling to get to the surface, and all sinking lower and lower in the dreadful deeps!  Throw a stone in, Mr. Betteredge!  Throw a stone in, and let’s see the sand suck it down!”