the lights of the supper shone in the gold bubbles of his wine glass.  He drained it hurriedly.  Outside the night, lying cold on deserted squares, blurred with gas lamps, was like a vain death after the idle frivolity of Stephen Jannan’s ball.  In an instant, in the shutting of a door, the blackness had claimed him; the gaiety of warm flesh and laughter vanished.  Death ... and he had literally nothing in his hands, nothing in his heart.  A duty, Eunice, remained.  The sound of his footfalls on the bricks, thrown back from blank walls, resembled the embodied, stealthy following of the injustice he had wrought.

XII

The following morning he made his way past the continuous produce arcade that held the centre of Market Street to the Camden Ferry.  At the river the fish stall, with its circular green roof and cornucopias, reached almost to the gloomy ferry-house with its heavy odour of wet wood.  The boat clattered through broken ice, by a trim packet ship, the Susquehanna, and into the narrow canal through Windmill Island.  Camden was a depressing region of low, marshy land, its streets unpaved and without gas, the gutters full of frozen, stagnant water.  He inquired the way to the Reverend Mr. Needles’, passed a brick meeting house, and, turning into Fourth Street, isolated frame dwellings, coming at last to a dingy wooden house with broken panes in the upper windows and a collapsing veranda at the edge of a blackened, skeleton wood.

A tall, gaunt woman in a ravelled worsted shawl answered his summons, and informed him, interrupted by a prolonged coughing, that Mr. Needles was away on circuit.  “I came for a child staying with you,” Jasper Penny explained shortly, suppressing an involuntary repulsion at the degraded surroundings.  “She’s not well,” the woman replied, with instant suspicion.  “I don’t just like to let a chancy person see her.”  He discarded all subterfuge.  “I am her father,” he stated.  The other shifted to a whining self-defence.  “And her in this sink!” she exclaimed, gazing at Jasper Penny’s furred coat, his glossy hat and gloves and ebony cane.

“I did all for her I could, considering the small money I was promised, and then half the time I didn’t get that, neither.  The lady owes for three weeks right now.  I suppose you’ll have to come in,” she concluded grudgingly.  They entered a dark hall, clay cold.  Beyond, in a slovenly kitchen hardly warmer, he found Eunice, his daughter; a curiously sluggish child with a pinched, hueless face and a meagre body in a man’s worn flannel shirt and ragged skirt and stockings.

“Here’s your father,” Mrs. Needles ejaculated.

Eunice stood in the middle of the bare floor, staring with pallid, open mouth at the imposing figure of the man.  She said nothing; and Jasper Penny found her silence more accusing than a shrill torrent of reproach.  “She’s kind of heavy like,” Mrs. Needles explained.  “I have come to take you away,” Jasper Penny said.  Then, turning to the woman:  “Are those all the clothes she has?” She grew duskily red.  “There are some others about, but I don’t just know where, and then she spoils them so fast.”