About the closed wine-shops and oyster-bars of the Haymarket a shadow of the dissipation of the night seemed still to linger; and a curious bent figure passed picking with a spiked stick cigar-ends out of the gutter; significant it was, and so too was the starving dog which the man drove from a bone.  The city was mean and squalid in the morning, and conveyed a sense of derision and reproach—­the sweep-carriage-road of Regent Street; the Royal Academy, pretentious, aristocratic; the Green Park still presenting some of the graces of a preceding century.  There were but three cabs on the rank.  The market-carts rolled along long Piccadilly, the great dray-horses shuffling, raising little clouds of dust in the barren street, the men dozing amid the vegetables.

They were now at Hyde Park Corner.  Thompson spoke of the improvements—­the breaking up of the town into open spaces; but he doubted if anything would be gained by these imitations of Paris.  His discourse was, however, interrupted by a porter from the Alexandra Hotel asking to be directed to a certain street.  He had been sent to fetch a doctor immediately—­a lady just come from an evening party had committed suicide.

“What was she like?” Harding asked.

“A tall woman.”

“Dark or fair?”

He couldn’t say, but thought she was something between the two.  Prompted by a strange curiosity, feeling, they knew not why, but still feeling that it might be some one from Temple Gardens, they went to the hotel, and obtained a description of the suicide from the head-porter.  The lady was very tall, with beautiful golden hair.  For a description of her dress the housemaid was called.

“I hope,” said Mike, “she won’t say she was dressed in cream-pink, trimmed with olive ribbons.”  She did.  Then Harding told the porter he was afraid the lady was Lady Helen Seymour, a friend of theirs, whom they had seen that night in a party given in Temple Gardens by this gentleman, Mr. Frank Escott.  They were conducted up the desert staircase of the hotel, for the lift did not begin working till seven o’clock.  The door stood ajar, and servants were in charge.  On the left was a large bed, with dark-green curtains, and in the middle of the room a round table.  There were two windows.  The toilette-table stood between bed and window, and in the bland twilight of closed Venetian blinds a handsome fire flared loudly, throwing changing shadows upon the ceiling, and a deep, glowing light upon the red panels of the wardrobe.  So the room fixed itself for ever on their minds.  They noted the crude colour of the Brussels carpet, and even the oilcloth around the toilette-table was remembered.  They saw that the round table was covered with a red tablecloth, and that writing materials were there, a pair of stays, a pair of tan gloves, and some withering flowers.  They saw the ball-dress that Lady Helen had worn thrown over the arm-chair; the silk stockings, the satin shoes—­and