iron mine. Volumes of noisome vapor rolled
slowly past them. The air hung close over their heads like an unseen,
vaulted roof. Red lights gleamed like vanishing stars down the elastic
vista. One light would turn out to be a coffee-stall, round which a
group of people gathered--cabmen muffled to the throat, women draggled
and dirty, boys with faces that were old. Another would be a
potato-engine, with its own volumes of white vapor, and the clank of its
oven door like the metallic echo of the miner's pick. The line of
regular lamps was like the line of candles stuck to the rock, the cross
streets were like the cross-workings, the damp air settling down into
streaks of moisture on the glass of the cab window was like the ceasless
drip, drip of the oozing water from overhead.

And to the two laden souls sitting within in silence and with clasped
hands, the great city, nay, the world itself, was like a colossal mine,
which human earthworms had burrowed underground, while the light and
the free air were both above.

At one point, where a patch of dry pavement indicated a bake-house under
the street, three or four squalid creatures crouched together and slept.
The streets were all but noiseless. It would be two hours yet before the
giant of traffic would awake. The few cabmen hailed each other as they
passed unrecognized, and their voices sounded hoarse. When the many
clocks struck two, the many tones came muffled through the dense air.

The journey was long and wearisome, but Paul and Greta scarcely felt it.
They were soon to part; they knew not when they were to meet again.
Perhaps soon, perhaps late; perhaps not until a darkness deeper than
this should cover the land.

Turning into Oxford Street, the cabman struck away to the west, in order
to come upon Westminster by the main artery of Regent Street. The great
thoroughfare was quiet enough now. Fashion was at rest, but even here,
and in its own mocking guise, misery had its haunt. A light laugh broke
the silence of the street, and a girl, so young as to be little more
than a child, dressed in soiled finery, and reeling with unsteady step
on the pavement, came up to the cab window and peered in.

At the open door of a hotel, from whence a shaft of light came out into
the fog, the cabman drew up. "Comfortable hotel, sir; think you'd like
to put up, sir?"

Paul dropped the window. "We want the Catholic convent at Westminster,
my man."

The cabman had put up his torch