, I worked at my painting of
"Ruth" all day; and on the next morning, as I was starting for
Primrose Court to seek her, Mrs. Gudgeon came kicking frantically at
the street-door. When it was opened, she came stamping upstairs, and
as I advanced to meet her, she shook her fists in my face, shouting
out: "I could tear your eyes out, you vagabones." "Why, what is the
matter?" I asked in great surprise. "You've bin and killed her,
that's all," said the woman, foaming at the mouth. She then told me
that her daughter, almost immediately on reaching home after having
left the studio in the company of my servant, had fallen down in a
swoon. A succession of swoons followed. She never rallied. She was
then lying dead in Primrose Court.'

'And what then? Answer me quickly.'

'She asked me to give her money that her daughter might be buried
respectably and not by the parish. I told her it was all
hallucination about the girl being her daughter, and that a spiritual
body could not be buried, but she seemed so genuinely distressed that
I gave her the money.'

'Spiritual body! Hallucination!' I said. 'I heard her voice in the
London streets, and she was seen selling baskets at the theatre door.
Where shall I find the house?'

'It is of no use for you to go there,' he said.

'Nothing shall prevent my going at once.' A feverish yearning had
come upon me to see the body.

'If you _will_ go,' said Wilderspin, 'it is No. 2 Primrose Court,
Great Queen Street, Holborn.

II

I hurried out of the house, and soon finding a cab I drove to Great
Queen Street.

My soul had passed now into another torture-chamber. It was being
torn between two warring, maddening forces--the passionate desire to
see her body, and the shrinking dread of undergoing the ordeal. At
one moment I felt--as palpably as I felt it, on the betrothal
night--her slim figure, soft as a twine of flowers in my arms: at the
next I was clasping a corpse--a rigid corpse in rags. And yet I can
scarcely say that I had any thoughts. At Great Queen Street I
dismissed the cab, and had some little difficulty in finding Primrose
Court, a miserable narrow alley. I knocked at a door which, even in
that light, I could see was a peculiarly wretched one. After a
considerable delay the door was opened and a face peered out--the
face of the woman whom I had seen in Cyril's studio. She did not at
first seem to recognise me. She was evidently far gone in liquor, and
looked at me, murmu