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"No, you don't," he said to her. "I thought there'd be some of you coming along to-night. Is it hunger working up with the fog, or is it remorse and despair?"

Katharine made no reply. Where, oh, where was Lily?

"If it's hunger and the fog, you'll get over it In course when you've had something to eat. of time you'll get used to hunger. I'm always hungry."

"Who are you? Let me go-let me go." "Not this way, then," he replied-for she made as if she would rush at the river-"not this way, Pretty! Don't do it. Have patience. Lord! if you'd gone through as much as I have, you'd have patience. Don't do it."

As he spoke, the black wall of fog rolled between them again. Katharine stole away under its protection, but she heard him repeat as she retreated: "Don't do it, Pretty. Have patience." It is now nothing but a memory of the past; but sometimes the gaunt and tattered figure of this man, holding out his long arms between her and the river, returns to Katharine's mind and stands up before her; she sees him blurred in the fog and the dim lamp-light; she hears his voice saying: "Don't do it, Pretty. Have paWho was this man, this failure and tience." wreck of manhood? and why did he lurk in the blackness upon those steps? Then her misery comes back to her again, her dreadful hunger and cold and weariness and desolation, and Katharine has-change but one letter and the pathetic becomes bathetic, pathos turns into bathos -has to "lie down"-woman's grandest medicine -until the memory of that night leaves her again.

The fog was so black again that she had not the least knowledge of the direction she was taking. Under each lamp there was a little yellow gleam of light. Beyond this a black wall all round it: when she stood under a lamp it was just exactly as if she were built up and buried alive in it, with a hole for a little light through yellow glass in the top.

Sometimes steps came along and faces came out of the black wall and looked curiously at her as they passed and disappeared. It was the face of a young man making his way home and marching confidently through the fog, or it was the face of a policeman who looked at her searchingly, asked her if she was lost, told her how to get back to the Strand, and went on his beat; once it was a girl of her own age who stood beside her for a few minutes and looked as if she wanted to speak, and then suddenly ran away from her. Why did she run away? Why, indeed? And once it was a very ugly face indeed, which greatly terrified her, a man's face, unshaven for many days and therefore thick with bristles round the mouth, a face with horrid red eyes and swollen cheeks.

"Have you got the price of a half-pint upon you?" he asked, roughly.

"I have not got one penny in the world," she replied.

Lily in fact had all the money belonging to them both-ninepence.

"You've got your jacket and your hat. Gimme your jacket and your hat." He proceeded, in the language common to his class, to touch briefly on the injustice of suffering an honest man to go about without a penny in his pocket, while a girl had a jacket and a hat which might be pawned. Perhaps he forgot that it was Sunday. But other steps were heard, and the creature of the night slunk away.

Katharine knew that she was still at the Westminster end of the Embankment, because the great clock struck the quarters and the hours apparently quite close to her.

The night was still and not cold. She was afraid to move outside the little yellow circle of light, but she could no longer stand; she sank to the ground, and leaning against the lamp post, she fell into a state of half-consciousness. The place was quite deserted now, even by the birds. of prey who prowl by night, and even by the homeless who come here when there is no fog and huddle together for warmth. When she lifted her head again and opened her eyes, cramped and cold, she saw that the fog was lifting and rolling away. The greatest horror of all-the long day and night of darkness-was passing away; a few minutes more, and the long line of lamps upon the bridge on one side and the Embankment on the other stood out clear and bright; the sky was clear and studded with stars; the air was pure again. To look round and see things once more, to breathe again the pure air, brought refreshment and relief. Katharine got up and looked over the wall upon the river running at her feet. She remembered that she had been very near to Death-a shameful, wicked, violent deaththe death of those whose wicked lives have driven them to despair. One more step and she would have plunged into the dark waters rushing and tearing up the stream with the tide. She tried to picture to herself what she had escaped: she recalled Lily's words: she would have been, by this

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