stepping feet.

Moving slowly past the heaps of bricks rising at intervals along
the road, coasting carefully round the old iron and the broken tiles
scattered here and there in his path, Mr. Bashwood advanced from the
direction of the country toward one of the unfinished streets of the
suburb. His personal appearance had been apparently made the object of
some special attention. His false teeth were brilliantly white; his
wig was carefully brushed; his mourning garments, renewed throughout,
gleamed with the hideous and slimy gloss of cheap black cloth. He moved
with a nervous jauntiness, and looked about him with a vacant smile.
Having reached the first of the skeleton cottages, his watery eyes
settled steadily for the first time on the view of the street before
him. The next instant he started; his breath quickened; he leaned,
trembling and flushing, against the unfinished wall at his side. A lady,
still at some distance, was advancing toward him down the length of the
street. "She's coming!" he whispered, with a strange mixture of rapture
and fear, of alternating color and paleness, showing itself in his
haggard face. "I wish I was the ground she treads on! I wish I was
the glove she's got on her hand!" He burst ecstatically into those
extravagant words, with a concentrated intensity of delight in uttering
them that actually shook his feeble figure from head to foot.

Smoothly and gracefully the lady glided nearer and nearer, until she
revealed to Mr. Bashwood's eyes, what Mr. Bashwood's instincts had
recognized in the first instance--the face of Miss Gwilt.

She was dressed with an exquisitely expressive economy of outlay. The
plainest straw bonnet procurable, trimmed sparingly with the cheapest
white ribbon, was on her head. Modest and tasteful poverty expressed
itself in the speckless cleanliness and the modestly proportioned skirts
of her light "print" gown, and in the scanty little mantilla of cheap
black silk which she wore over it, edged with a simple frilling of
the same material. The luster of her terrible red hair showed itself
unshrinkingly in a plaited coronet above her forehead, and escaped in
one vagrant love-lock, perfectly curled, that dropped over her left
shoulder. Her gloves, fitting her like a second skin, were of the sober
brown hue which is slowest to show signs of use. One hand lifted her
dress daintily above the impurities of the road; the other held a little
nosegay of the commonest garden