ptive
faculties of my mother be also deceived?

But to accept the fact that she who died on that mattress was little
Winnie of the sands was to go stark mad, and the very instinct of
self-preservation made me clutch at every sophism Hope could offer.

'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 th