I felt some surprise, therefore, when I found a light there at this time of night; still more surprise when I saw what she was doing.
She was seated on the mud floor, with a rush-light before her, and on either side of her a high-piled heap of refuse and rubbish.

From one of these, at the moment I caught sight of her, she was sorting things--horrible filthy sweepings of road or floor--to the other; shaking and sifting each article as she passed it across, and then taking up another and repeating the action with it, and so on--all minutely, warily, with an air of so much patience and persistence that I stood wondering.

Some things--rags--she held up between her eyes and the light, some she passed through her fingers, some she fairly tore in pieces.

And all the time her husband stood watching her greedily, my platter still in his hand, as if her strange occupation fascinated him.
I stood looking, also, for half a minute, perhaps; then the man's eye, raised for a single second to the door-way, met mine.

He started, muttered something to his wife, and, quick as thought, he kicked the light out, leaving the shed in darkness.