"Is anyone following ?" I shook my head.

She was attempting now, but gently, to draw back the hand to which I clung; and, in resisting, my fingers met and pulled against a ring--a single ring of plain gold.
Seeing that I had observed it, she made no further effort, but let her hand lie, her eyes at the same moment meeting mine and searching them gravely and curiously.
"Come upstairs," she said; "but tread softly.

My father is a light sleeper." She took me to a room in the corner of which stood a white bed with the sheets neatly turned down, prepared and ready for a guest.
The room was filled with the scent of flowers--fragrant scent of roses and clean aromatic scent of carnations.

There were fainter scents, too, of jasmine and lavender; the first wafted in from a great bush beyond the open lattice, the second (as I afterwards discovered) exhaled by the white linen of the bed.

But flowers were everywhere, in bowls and jars and glasses; and as though other receptacles for them had failed, one long spray of small roses climbed the dressing-table from a brown pitcher at its foot.
She motioned me to a chair beside the bed, and, almost before I knew what was intended, she had fetched a basin of water and was kneeling to wash my feet.
"No--please!" I protested.
"But I love children," she whispered; "and you are but a child." So I sat in a kind of dream while she washed away the dust and blood, changing the water twice, and afterwards dried each foot in a towel, pressing firmly but never once hurting me.
When this was done, she rose and stood musing, contemplating me seriously and yet with a touch of mirth in her eyes.
"You are such a little one!" she said.