and if you will only promise not to interfere with me, and to let me leave you, when and how I please -- I have a friend in London who will be glad to receive me -- I want nothing else -- will you promise?'
She looked anxiously up and down the road; shifted her bag again from one hand to the other; repeated the words, `Will you promise?' and looked hard in my face, with a pleading fear and confusion that it troubled me to see.
What could I do? Here was a stranger utterly and helplessly at my mercy -- and that stranger a forlorn woman. No house was near; no one was passing whom I could consult; and no earthly right existed on my part to give me a power of control over her, even if I had known how to exercise it. I trace these lines, self-distrustfully, with the shadows of after events darkening the very paper I write on; and still I say, what could I do?
What I did do, was to try and gain time by questioning her.
`Are you sure that your friend in London will receive you at such a late hour as this?' I said.
`Quite sure. Only say you will let me leave you when and how I please -- only say you won't interfere with me. Will you promise?'
As she repeated the words for the third time, she carne close to me and laid her hand, with a sudden gentle stealthiness, on my bosom -- a thin hand; a cold hand (when I removed it with mine) even on that sultry night. Remember that I was young; remember that the hand which touched me was a woman's.
`Will you promise?'
`Yes.'
One word! The little familiar word that is on everybody's lips, every hour in the day. Oh me! and I tremble, now, when I write it.
We set our faces towards London, and walked on together in the first still hour of the new day -- I, and this woman, whose name, whose character, whose story, whose objects in life, whose very presence by my side, at that moment, were fathomless mysteries to me. It was like a dream. Was I Walter Hartright? Was this the well-known, uneventful road, where holiday people strolled on Sundays? Had I really left, little more than an hour since, the quiet, decent, conventionally domestic atmosphere of my mother's cottage? I was too bewildered -- too conscious also of a vague sense of something like self-reproach -- to speak to my strange companion for some minutes. It was her voice again that first broke the silence between us.
`I want to ask you something,' she said suddenly. `Do you know many people in London?'
`Yes, a great many.'
`Many men of rank and title?' There was an unmistakable tone of suspicion in the strange question. I hesitated about answering it.
`Some,' I said, after a moment's silence.
`Many' -- she came to a full stop, and looked me searchingly in the face -- `many men of the rank of Baronet?'
Too much astonished to reply, I questioned her in my turn.
`Why do you ask?'
`Because I hope, for my own sake, there is one Baronet that you don't know.'