“My life has been too terrible!” she thought.  “I wish I was dead.  I have been through too much.  It is monstrous, and I cannot stand it.  I do not want to die, but I wish I was dead.”

There was a discreet knock on the door.

“Come in,” she said, in a calm, resigned, cheerful voice.  The sound had recalled her with the swiftness of a miracle to the unconquerable dignity of human pride.

Mr. Till Boldero entered.

“I should like you to come downstairs and drink a cup of tea,” he said.  He was a marvel of tact and good nature.  “My wife is unfortunately not here, and the house is rather at sixes and sevens; but I have sent out for some tea.”

She followed him downstairs into the parlour.  He poured out a cup of tea.

“I was forgetting,” she said.  “I am forbidden tea.  I mustn’t drink it.”

She looked at the cup, tremendously tempted.  She longed for tea.  An occasional transgression could not harm her.  But no!  She would not drink it.

“Then what can I get you?”

“If I could have just milk and water,” she said meekly.

Mr. Boldero emptied the cup into the slop basin, and began to fill it again.

“Did he tell you anything?” she asked, after a considerable silence.

“Nothing,” said Mr. Boldero in his low, soothing tones.  “Nothing except that he had come from Liverpool.  Judging from his shoes I should say he must have walked a good bit of the way.”

“At his age!” murmured Sophia, touched.

“Yes,” sighed Mr. Boldero.  “He must have been in great straits.  You know, he could scarcely talk at all.  By the way, here are his clothes.  I have had them put aside.”

Sophia saw a small pile of clothes on a chair.  She examined the suit, which was still damp, and its woeful shabbiness pained her.  The linen collar was nearly black, its stud of bone.  As for the boots, she had noticed such boots on the feet of tramps.  She wept now.  These were the clothes of him who had once been a dandy living at the rate of fifty pounds a week.

“No luggage or anything, of course?” she muttered.

“No,” said Mr. Boldero.  “In the pockets there was nothing whatever but this.”

He went to the mantelpiece and picked up a cheap, cracked letter case, which Sophia opened.  In it were a visiting card—­’Senorita Clemenzia Borja’—­and a bill-head of the Hotel of the Holy Spirit, Concepcion del Uruguay, on the back of which a lot of figures had been scrawled.

“One would suppose,” said Mr. Boldero, “that he had come from South America.”

“Nothing else?”

“Nothing.”

Gerald’s soul had not been compelled to abandon much in the haste of its flight.

A servant announced that Mrs. Scales’s friends were waiting for her outside in the motor-car.  Sophia glanced at Mr. Till Boldero with an exacerbated anxiety on her face.

“Surely they don’t expect me to go back with them tonight!” she said.  “And look at all there is to be done!”