had walked some distance along Praed Street, and was now in the wilderness of pretentious, stucco-faced mansions, which lie between Paddington and the north side of Hyde Park.  She knew it was useless to seek for lodgings here, so pressed on, hoping to arrive at a humbler neighbourhood, where she would be more likely to get what she wanted.  As she walked, the front doors of the big houses would now and again open, when she was much surprised at the vulgar appearance of many of those who came out.  It seemed to her as if the district in which she found herself was largely tenanted by well-to-do, but self-made people.  After walking for many minutes, she reached the Bayswater Road, which just now was all but deserted.  The bare trees on the further side of the road accentuated the desolation of the thoroughfare.  She turned to the left and pressed on, fighting valiantly against the persistent spirit of loneliness which seemed to dog her footsteps.  Men and girls hurried by to keep appointments with friends or lovers.  Buses jogged past her, loaded with people who all had somewhere to go, and probably someone who looked for their coming.  She was friendless and alone.  Ever since her interview with Perigal she had realised how everything she valued in life, if not life itself, depended on her implicit faith in him.  He had told her that there could be no love without trust; she had believed in this assertion as if it had been another revelation, and it had enabled her to go through the past week with hardly a pang of regret (always excepting her parting from Jill) at breaking with all the associations that had grown about her life during her happy stay at Melkbridge.

Now doubts assailed her mind.  She knew that if she surrendered to them it meant giving way to despair; she thought of any and all of Perigal’s words which she could honestly construe into a resolve on his part to marry her before her child was born.  As she thus struggled against her unquiet thoughts, two men (at intervals of a few minutes) followed and attempted to speak to her.  Their unwelcome attentions increased her uneasiness of mind; they seemed to tell her of the dubious ways by which men sought to entangle in their toils those of her own sex who were pleasing to the eye:  just now, she lumped all men together, and would not admit that there was any difference between them.  Arrived in the neighbourhood of the Marble Arch, she was sure of her ground.  She was reminded of her wanderings of evenings from “Dawes’,” when, if not exploring Soho, she had often walked in this direction.  Memories of those long-forgotten days, which now seemed so remote, assailed her at every step.  Then she had believed herself to be unhappy.  Now she would have given many years of her life to be able to change her present condition (including her trust in Perigal) to be as she was before she had met him.  Directly she crossed Edgware Road, the pavement became more crowded.  Shop-girls (the type of young woman she