I obeyed her.
"You might as well sit down," she said with some petulance. "There's
nothing up here to hurt you." There was so much meaning in her tone of
the things that would hurt me on the floor below that I hastened to
show my confidence in her, and drew up a chair to the table.
"At your service," I said, leaning before her with as much an
appearance of jaunty self-possession as I could muster.
"Who are you, and what are you doing here?" she asked grimly.
What should I answer? Could I tell her the truth? "Who are you?" she
repeated impatiently, gazing on me. "You are not Wilton. Tell me. Who
are you?"
The face, hard as it was, seamed with the record of a rough and evil
life, as it appeared, had yet a kindly look as it was turned on me.
"My name is Dudley,--Giles Dudley."
"Where is Wilton?"
"Dead."
"Dead? Did you kill him?" The half-kindly look disappeared from her
eyes, and the hard lines settled into an expression of malevolent
repulsiveness.
"He was my best friend," I said sadly; and then I described the leading
events of the tragedy I had witnessed.
The old woman listened closely, and with hardly the movement of a
muscle, to the tale I told.
"And you think he left his job to you?" she said with a sneer.
"I have taken it up as well as I can. To be frank with you, Mrs.
Borton, I know nothing about his job. I'm going along on blind chance,
and trying to keep a whole skin."
The old woman looked at me in amazement.
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