wrong?"

She spoke with unnecessary earnestness and agitation, and shrank
back from me several paces. I did my best to reassure her.

"Pray don't suppose that I have any idea of suspecting you," I
said, "or any other wish than to be of assistance to you, if I
can. I only wondered at your appearance in the road, because it
seemed to me to be empty the instant before I saw you."

She turned, and pointed back to a place at the junction of the
road to London and the road to Hampstead, where there was a gap in
the hedge.

"I heard you coming," she said, "and hid there to see what sort of
man you were, before I risked speaking. I doubted and feared
about it till you passed; and then I was obliged to steal after
you, and touch you."

Steal after me and touch me? Why not call to me? Strange, to say
the least of it.

"May I trust you?" she asked. "You don't think the worse of me
because I have met with an accident?" She stopped in confusion;
shifted her bag from one hand to the other; and sighed bitterly.

The loneliness and helplessness of the woman touched me. The
natural impulse to assist her and to spare her got the better of
the judgment, the caution, the worldly tact, which an older,
wiser, and colder man might have summoned to help him in this