ther they were turning. They knew they were in a
network of by-ways, flanked by warehouses and offices, and sometimes
they stumbled on terraces of decrepit old dwelling-houses. They were
vaguely conscious that they were leaving the river far behind, and that
they must have crossed Eastcheap again at some narrower part without
recognising it. After some leisurely wandering they came into a more
important thoroughfare with pretentious edifices, yet with archaic
touches here and there, the relics of another epoch, worn and decaying,
yet more suggestive of coming stone buildings to supplant them than of
the glory of their own century.

At a street-corner, under the light of a lamp that was still pale in the
gathering dusk, a shivering flower-seller with a red shawl over her
shoulders stood with a basket of deliciously fresh violets, and Wyndham
stopped to get a big bunch of them put together for his companion. Lady
Betty was immensely gratified; she breathed in the odour of the violets
with rapture, then fastened them in her bosom. She was herself again
now, overflowing with good fellowship, and amused at every trifle. He
caught her exhilaration. "We shall fill our evening with a whirl of
gaiety!" he cried. "Rockets and fireworks; I wonder if the good star you
spoke of will be kind enough to set down in our path some unheard-of
theatre."

She suggested they should study the hoardings as they went along, and
both undertook to keep a look-out. But they were absorbed again in each
other, having only a vague pleasurable sense of the crowded roads into
which their steps now took them. Eventually they were in a main
thoroughfare, with bustling shops brilliantly alight, and endless lines
of stalls a-blazing; the roadway full of traffic and tram-cars and
amazingly gigantic hay-carts, the pavements thick with a working
population pressing forward and forward in multitudes. It was night now,
absolutely; but it had stolen on them so gradually, they were astonished
it was so definitely manifest. The hours of light were fresh and vivid
in their minds, they could almost hear and feel the unending clatter of
the omnibus that had carried them across the town, and the riverside
picture was still before them. The change that had come over the world,
this transition to absolute darkness illumined by street-lamps and
flaring naphtha, seemed mystic and amazing. And a subtle warmth from
all this illumination and from all this press and bustle,