He then went on talking upon art and poetry, letting fall at every moment gems of criticism that would have made the fortune of a critic.

After a while, however, he threw down the brush and said,

’Sometimes I can paint with another man in the studio; sometimes I can’t.’

I rose to go.

‘No, no,’ he said; ’I don’t want you to go, yet I don’t like keeping you in this musty studio on such a morning.  Suppose we take a stroll together.’

‘But you never walk out in the daytime.’

’Not often; indeed, I may say never, unless it is to go to the Zoo, or to Jamrach’s, which I do about once in three months.’

‘Jamrach’s!’ I said.  ’Why, he’s the importer of animals, isn’t he?  Of all places in London that is the one I should most like to see.’  He then took me into a long panelled room with bay windows looking over the Thames, furnished with remarkable Chinese chairs and tables.  And then we left the house.

In Maud Street a hansom passed us; D’Arcy hailed it.

‘We will take this to the Bank,’ said he, ’and then walk through the East End to Jamrach’s.  Jump in.’

As we drove off, the sun was shining brilliantly, and London seemed very animated—­seemed to be enjoying itself.  Until we reached the Bank our drive was through all the most cheerful-looking and prosperous streets of London.  It acted like a tonic on me, and for the first time since my trouble I felt really exhilarated.  As to D’Arcy, after we had left behind us what he called the ‘stucco world’ of the West End, his spirits seemed to rise every minute, and by the time we reached the Strand he was as boisterous as a boy on a holiday.

On reaching the Bank we dismissed the hansom and proceeded to walk to Ratcliffe Highway.  Before reaching it I was appalled at the forbidding aspect of the neighbourhood.  It was not merely that the unsavoury character of the streets offended and disgusted me, but the locality wore a sinister aspect which acted upon my imagination in the strangest, wildest way.  Why was it that this aspect fairly cowed me, scared me?  I felt that I was not frightened on my own account, and yet when I asked myself why I was frightened I could not find a rational answer.

As I saw the sailors come noisily from their boarding-houses; as I saw the loafers standing at the street corners, smoking their dirty pipes and gazing at us; as I saw the tawdry girls, bare-headed or in flaunting hats covered with garish flowers, my thoughts, for no conceivable reason, ran upon Winnie more persistently than they had run upon her since I had abandoned all hope of seeing her in Wales.

The thought came to me that, grievous as was her fate and mine, the tragedy of our lives might have been still worse.

‘Suppose,’ I said, ’that instead of being lost in the Welsh hills she had been lost here!’ I shuddered at the thought.

Again that picture in the Welsh pool came to me, the picture of Winnie standing at a street corner, offering matches for sale.  D’Arcy then got talking about Sinfi Lovell and her strange superiority in every respect to the few Gypsy women he had seen.