“There!  Now I will, now I will.  So she said, could I tell her how to find it, and I said yes, and I told her; and she looked at me with eyes like almost as if she was blind, and herself all waving back.  And so she took out the letter, and showed it me, and said if she was to put that in the post-office, it would be rubbed out and not minded and never sent; and would I take it from her, and send it, and the messenger would be paid at the house.  And so I said yes, if it was no harm, and she said no—­no harm.  And so I took it from her, and she said she had nothing to give me, and I said I was poor myself and consequently wanted nothing.  And so she said God bless you, and went.”

“And did she go—­”

“Yes,” cried the girl, anticipating the inquiry.  “Yes!  She went the way I had shown her.  Then I came in, and Mrs. Snagsby came behind me from somewhere and laid hold of me, and I was frightened.”

Mr. Woodcourt took her kindly from me.  Mr. Bucket wrapped me up, and immediately we were in the street.  Mr. Woodcourt hesitated, but I said, “Don’t leave me now!” and Mr. Bucket added, “You’ll be better with us, we may want you; don’t lose time!”

I have the most confused impressions of that walk.  I recollect that it was neither night nor day, that morning was dawning but the street-lamps were not yet put out, that the sleet was still falling and that all the ways were deep with it.  I recollect a few chilled people passing in the streets.  I recollect the wet house-tops, the clogged and bursting gutters and water-spouts, the mounds of blackened ice and snow over which we passed, the narrowness of the courts by which we went.  At the same time I remember that the poor girl seemed to be yet telling her story audibly and plainly in my hearing, that I could feel her resting on my arm, that the stained house-fronts put on human shapes and looked at me, that great water-gates seemed to be opening and closing in my head or in the air, and that the unreal things were more substantial than the real.

At last we stood under a dark and miserable covered way, where one lamp was burning over an iron gate and where the morning faintly struggled in.  The gate was closed.  Beyond it was a burial ground —­a dreadful spot in which the night was very slowly stirring, but where I could dimly see heaps of dishonoured graves and stones, hemmed in by filthy houses with a few dull lights in their windows and on whose walls a thick humidity broke out like a disease.  On the step at the gate, drenched in the fearful wet of such a place, which oozed and splashed down everywhere, I saw, with a cry of pity and horror, a woman lying—­Jenny, the mother of the dead child.

I ran forward, but they stopped me, and Mr. Woodcourt entreated me with the greatest earnestness, even with tears, before I went up to the figure to listen for an instant to what Mr. Bucket said.  I did so, as I thought.  I did so, as I am sure.