‘That was for the price, don’t you know?’ said Sleaford.  ’What did you give her?’

’I gave her a shilling, my lord, which she looked at for some time in a state of bewilderment.  She then began to feel about her as if for something.’

‘She was feelin’ for the change, don’t you know?’ said Sleaford, not in the least degree perceiving how these interruptions of a prosaic mind were maddening me.

‘I told her that I wanted to speak to her,’ continued Wilderspin, ’and asked her where she lived.  She gave me the same bewildered, other-world look with which she had regarded the shilling, a look which seemed to say, “Go away now:  leave me alone!” As I did not go, she began to appear afraid of me, and moved away towards Temple Bar, and then crossed the street.  I followed, as far behind as I could without running the danger of losing sight of her, to a wretched place running out of Great Queen Street.  Holborn, which I afterwards found was called Primrose Court, and when I got there she had disappeared in one of the squalid houses opening into the court.  I knocked at the first door once or twice before an answer came, and then a tiny girl with the face of a woman opened it.  “Is there a beggar-girl living here?” I asked.  “No,” answered the child in a sharp, querulous voice.  “You mean Meg Gudgeon’s gal wot sings and does the rainy-night dodge.  She lives next house.”  And the child slammed the door in my face.  I knocked at the next door, and after waiting for a minute it was opened by a short, middle-aged woman, with black eyes and a flattened nose, who stared at me, and then said, “A Quaker, by the looks o’ ye.”  She had the strident voice of a raven, and she smelt, I thought, of gin.’

‘But, Mr. Wilderspin, Mr. Wilderspin, you said the girl was safe!’

It was my mother’s voice, but so loud, sharp, and agonised was it that it did not seem to be her voice at all.  In that dreadful moment, however, I had no time to heed it.  At the description of the hideous den and the odious Mrs. Gudgeon, whose face as I had seen it in Cyril’s studio had haunted me in the crypt, a dreadful shudder passed through my frame; an indescribable sense of nausea stirred within me; and for a moment I felt as though the pains of dissolution were on me.  And there was something in Wilderspin’s face—­what was it?—­that added to my alarm.  ‘Stay for a moment,’ I said to him; ‘I cannot yet bear to hear any more.’

’I know the dread that has come upon you, and upon your kind, sympathetic mother,’ said he; ’but she you are disturbed about was not a prisoner in the kind of place my words seem to describe.’

‘But the woman?’ said my mother.  ’How could she be safe in such hands?’

‘Has he not said she is safe?’ I cried, in a voice that startled even my own ears, so loud and angry it was, and yet I hardly knew why.

‘You forget,’ said Wilderspin, turning to my mother, ’that the whole spiritual world was watching over her.’