here 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.'

'But was the place very--was it so very squalid?' said my mother.
'Pray describe it to us, Mr. Wilderspin; I am really very anxious.'

'No!' I said; 'I want no description: I shall go and see for myself.'

'But; Henry, I am most anxious to know about this poor girl, and I
want Mr. Wilderspin to tell us how and where he found her.'

'The "poor girl" concerns me alone, mother. Our calamities--Winnie's
and mine--are between us two and God....You engaged her, Wilderspin,
of the woman whom I saw at Cyril's studio, to sit as a model? What
passed when she came?'

'The woman brought her next day,' said Wilderspin, 'and I sketched in
the face of Pelagia as Isis at once. I had already taken out the face
of the prev