The night wore on like eternity, with immeasurable slowness yet incredible swiftness.  She had been walking for hours, and yet she had no feeling of fatigue.  She seemed to move through the streets without any effort of her own.  Towards the morning she was carried along with a complete absence of bodily sensation, as if she had been in very truth one of those disembodied spirits of Mrs. Johns’ spirit world, driven through the solitude of the ages by the implacable decree of some incalculable malignant force called immortality.  She felt as though centuries of time had rolled over her head when the murk of the lowering sky lightened, and the London dawn was born, naked and grey.

The dawn brought London to life with a speed which was in the nature of a miracle.  From the appearance of the first workers to the flocking of the streets, was, as it were, but a moment.  The ’buses and trams commenced running, and shops opened.  Sisily found herself walking along Holborn, where the thickening crowds jostled her as she walked.  But she did not care for that now, nor did she seek the comparative seclusion of the side streets.  Her fear of capture had passed away, and her only feeling was impenetrable isolation and loneliness.  The people who were passing had no more existence to her than if they had been a troop of ghosts.  She had the sensation of belonging to another world and could not have communicated with them if she had wished.  But the spirit which had sustained her during the night disappeared with the clamorous advance of the day.  She became in an instant conscious of the grievous pangs of a body which seemed to have been flung back to her in a damaged state.  It ached all over.  Her head throbbed with a dull buzzing sound, and she was so tired that she could hardly stand.  She felt as if she must lie down—­in the street, anywhere.  And she was tormented by thirst.  But she still kept on.

She found herself, after a while, by one of those little backwaters which are the salvation of strangers to London:  a green railed square, with trees and fountains, and a quiet pavement where a street artist was drawing bright pictures with crayons.  An old four-wheeler was moored in the gutter by the entrance, the horse munching in the depths of a nose-bag, the elderly driver reclining against the side of the cab, smoking and watching the pavement artist.

Sisily entered the empty square to rest herself.  As she sat there on one of the wooden seats the full misery of her situation came home to her, and she asked herself anxiously what she was to do.  She had nowhere to go, and no money to buy food or shelter—­nothing in the world that she could call her own except the clothes she was wearing.  They were the coat and skirt she had put on to come to London, and she noticed with feminine concern that the dark cloth showed disreputable stains and splashes of her night’s exposure.  Hastily she took her handkerchief from her pocket to remove the tell-tale marks.  As she did so a bit of buff cardboard fluttered on to the gravel at her feet.  She stooped and picked it up.  It was the return half of her ticket to Cornwall.