er ears; that the stranger's figure remained present to her,
hours afterwards, when she sat at the window, plying her needle; and his
words seemed newly spoken, again and again. He had touched the spring
that opened her whole life; and if she lost him for a short space, it
was only among the many shapes of the one great recollection of which
that life was made.

Musing and working by turns; now constraining herself to be steady at
her needle for a long time together, and now letting her work fall,
unregarded, on her lap, and straying wheresoever her busier thoughts
led, Harriet Carker found the hours glide by her, and the day steal on.
The morning, which had been bright and clear, gradually became overcast;
a sharp wind set in; the rain fell heavily; and a dark mist drooping
over the distant town, hid it from the view.

She often looked with compassion, at such a time, upon the stragglers
who came wandering into London, by the great highway hard by, and who,
footsore and weary, and gazing fearfully at the huge town before them,
as if foreboding that their misery there would be but as a drop of water
in the sea, or as a grain of sea-sand on the shore, went shrinking on,
cowering before the angry weather, and looking as if the very elements
rejected them. Day after day, such travellers crept past, but always, as
she thought, In one direction--always towards the town. Swallowed up in
one phase or other of its immensity, towards which they seemed impelled
by a desperate fascination, they never returned. Food for the hospitals,
the churchyards, the prisons, the river, fever, madness, vice, and
death,--they passed on to the monster, roaring in the distance, and were
lost.

The chill wind was howling, and the rain was falling, and the day was
darkening moodily, when Harriet, raising her eyes from the work on which
she had long since been engaged with unremitting constancy, saw one of
these travellers approaching.

A woman. A solitary woman of some thirty years of age; tall;
well-formed; handsome; miserably dressed; the soil of many country roads
in varied weather--dust, chalk, clay, gravel--clotted on her grey cloak
by the streaming wet; no bonnet on her head, nothing to defend her rich
black hair from the rain, but a torn handkerchief; with the fluttering
ends of which, and with her hair, the wind blinded her so that she often
stopped to push them back, and look upon the way she was going.

She was in the act of doing so