giving heed, and not to the ceaseless patter of the rain.  What power they have with us, those voices!  While they speak to us we hear nothing else; we know of nothing that is taking place; there is no Present at all; we are living our lives again.  If purely, so much the better for us; if vilely, viciously, there is no end to the contaminating association.  It is to escape this that some men work, and others pray.  The furniture of the room was peculiar to the neighborhood; massive, yet cheap.  It had been good once; but long before it came into the hands of her who now owned it.  There was the round bulging looking-glass; the side-board was adapted for quite a magnificent show of plate and tankards—­only there were none; a horse-hair sofa, from which you would have seen the intestines protruding had it not been for the continuous gloom.  If the sun ever visited Rupert Street, it shone on the other side of the way.  On the mantel-piece were two of those huge shells in which the tropic deep is ever murmuring.  Who that has taken lodgings in London does not know them?  Who has not sometimes forgotten the commonplaces of his life in listening to those cold lifeless lips?  If you take them up on their own tropic shore, they will tell you of the roar of London streets.

There were two articles in the room, however, which were peculiar to itself.  The one was a human skull—­to all appearance, the same as all other skulls, the virtue of which has gone out of them, though it had once belonged to no common man.  The second object could still less be termed an ornament than the first, although it was a picture.  It depicted a woman of frightful aspect, having but one eye, and a hare-lip; she was standing up, and appeared to be declaiming or dictating; while an old cripple, at a table beside her, took down her words in writing.  If you had gone all over the rest of the house—­and it was a large one—­you would have found nothing else remarkable, or which did not smack of Bloomsbury.  It was, indeed, nothing but a lodging-house, and the room we have described was the private apartment of its mistress.  She might consult her own private taste, she considered, in her own room, else the skull and the picture occasionally rather shocked “the daintier sense” of the new lodgers, to whom the landlady gave audience in this apartment.  She is as little like a lodging-house keeper, to look at, as can be imagined.  Her cheeks are firm and fresh-colored, her teeth white and shining, her eyes quite bright, and her hands plump.  To one who knows her age, as we do—­she is fifty-three—­she looks like an old woman who has found out the secret of perpetual youth, but has kept it for her own use, as, in such a case, every woman probably would do.  There is only one piece of deception in her appearance; her black hair, which clusters over her forehead like a girl’s, is dyed of that color:  it is in reality as white as snow.  By lamp-light, as you see her now, she might be a woman of five-and-twenty, penning a letter to her love.  But she is, in fact, writing to her son; for it is Mrs. Yorke.  Writing to him, but not thinking of him, surely, when she frowns as now, and leans back in her chair with that menacing and angry look.  No; her anger is not directed against him, although he has left her and home, long since, upon an adventure of which she disapproved.