’Did not the woman declare that the singing-girl and the model were not one and the same?’ said Hope.  ’And if she did not lie, may you not have been, after all, hunting a shadow through London?’

‘It might not have been Winifred,’ I shouted.

But no sooner had I done so than the scene in the studio—­Wilderspin’s story of the model’s terror on seeing my mother’s portrait—­came upon me, and ‘Dead! dead!’ rang through me like a funeral knell:  all the superstructure of Hope’s sophisms was shattered in a moment like a house of cards:  my imagination flew away to all the London graveyards I had ever heard of; and there, in the part divided by the pauper line, my soul hovered over a grave newly made, and then dived down from coffin to coffin, one piled above another, till it reached Winifred, lying pressed down by the superincumbent mass; those eyes staring.

Yes; that night I was mad!

I could not walk fatigue into my restless limbs.  Morning broke in curdling billows of fire over the east of London—­which even at this early hour was slowly growing hazy with smoke.  I found myself in Primrose Court, looking at that squalid door, those squalid windows.  I knocked at the door.  No answer came to my summons, and I knocked again and again.  Then a window opened above my head, and I heard the well-known voice of the woman exclaiming,

’Who’s that?  Poll Onion’s out to-night, and the rooms are emp’y ’cept mine.  Why, God bless me, man, is it you?’

‘Hag! that was not your daughter.’

She slammed the window down.

‘Let me in, or I will break the door.’

The window was opened again.

’Lucky as I didn’t leave the front door open to-night, as I mostly do.  What do you want to skear a pore woman for?’ she bawled.  ’Go away, else I’ll call up the people in Great Queen Street.’

‘Mrs. Gudgeon, all I want to do is to ask you a question.’

‘Ah, but that’s what you jis’ won’t do, my fine gentleman.  I don’t let you in again in a hurry.’

‘I will give you a sovereign.’

‘Honour bright?’ bawled the old woman; ‘let me look at it.’

‘Here it is, in my hand.’

‘Jink it on the stuns.’

I threw it down.

‘Quid seems to jink all right, anyhow,’ she said, ’though I’m more used to the jink of a tanner than a quid in these cussed times.  You won’t skear me if I come down?’

‘No, no.’

At last I heard her fumbling inside at the lock, and then the door opened.

‘Why, man alive! your eyes are afire jist like a cat’s wi’ drownded kitlins.’

‘She was not your daughter.’

‘Not my darter?’ said she, as she stooped to pick up the sovereign.  ‘You ain’t a-goin’ to catch me the likes o’ that.  The Beauty not my darter!  All the court knows she was my own on’y darter.  I’ll swear afore all the beaks in London as I’m the mother of my own on’y darter Winifred, allus’ wur ‘er mother, and allus wull be; an’ if she went a-beggin’ it worn’t my fort.  She liked beggin’, poor dear; some gals does.’