ing posted this at the first pillar-box she walked
on.

Her only object was to combat mental anguish by bodily exercise, to
distract, if possible, the thoughts which hammered upon her brain by
moving amid the life of the streets. In Camberwell Road she passed the
place of business inscribed with the names 'Lord and Barmby'; it made
her think, not of the man who, from being an object of her good-natured
contempt, was now become a hated enemy, but of her father, and she
mourned for him with profounder feeling than when her tears flowed
over his new-made grave. But for headstrong folly, incredible in the
retrospect, that father would have been her dear and honoured companion,
her friend in every best sense of the word, her guide and protector.
Many and many a time had he invited her affection, her trust. For long
years it was in her power to make him happy, and, in doing so, to enrich
her own life, to discipline her mind as no study of books, even had it
been genuine, ever could. Oh, to have the time back again--the despised
privilege--the thwarted embittered love! She was beginning to understand
her father, to surmise with mature intelligence the causes of his
seeming harshness. To her own boy, when he was old enough, she would
talk of him and praise him. Perhaps, even thus late, his spirit of stern
truthfulness might bear fruit in her life and in her son's.

The tender memory and pure resolve did not long possess her. They soon
yielded before the potency of present evil, and for an hour or more she
walked along the sordid highway, nursing passions which struck their
venom into her heart.

It was one of those cold, dry, clouded evenings of autumn, when London
streets affect the imagination with a peculiar suggestiveness. New-lit
lamps, sickly yellow under the dying day, stretch in immense vistas,
unobscured by fog, but exhibit no detail of the track they will
presently illumine; one by one the shop-fronts grow radiant on deepening
gloom, and show in silhouette the figures numberless that are hurrying
past. By accentuating a pause between the life of daytime and that which
will begin after dark, this grey hour excites to an unwonted perception
of the city's vastness and of its multifarious labour; melancholy, yet
not dismal, the brooding twilight seems to betoken Nature's compassion
for myriad mortals exiled from her beauty and her solace. Noises far and
near blend into a muffled murmur, sound's equivalent of the impress