more afraid of her than of the locked door. About this strange, almost
uncannily beautiful child of the riverside slum there was a fascination
which appealed to him more and more. The longer he looked at the wide,
light-blue eyes, listened to the hoarse but moving voice, the more
valiantly he had to struggle against the spell which he felt her to be
casting upon him.

"I've strained my wrist a little, I think. Nothing to matter," said he.

But as he moved he found that the wrist gave him pain. He got up from
the floor, and stood with his left hand clasping the injured right
wrist, not so eager as before to make his escape.

"Why don't you let me out?" he asked at last, sharply, with an effort.

The girl looked at him with yet a new expression on her mobile face--an
expression of desperation.

"Because I couldn't bear it any longer," she whispered. And as she spoke
her eyes wandered round the bare walls and rested for a moment on the
inner door. "Because when you've been all alone in the cold, without any
food, without any one to speak to for two days and two nights, you feel
you must speak to some one, whatever comes of it. If I'd had to wait out
there, listening, listening, for another night, I should have been mad,
raving mad in the morning."

"But I don't understand it at all," said Max, again inclining to belief
in the girl's story, impressed by her passionate earnestness. "Where has
your grandmother gone to? Why didn't she take you with her? Can't you
tell me the whole story?"