dark obscure streets, shunning the lighted thoroughfares.
She had no settled plan in her mind, except to keep on. Hers was the
instinct of the hunted creature for darkness and obscurity. Her fevered
spirit hurried her along, spurring her with the menace of an imprisonment
which was worse than the cramped horror of the grave. In the grave there
was no consciousness of the weight of the earth above, but in prison, held
like an animal, watched by horrible men, beating despairing hands against
locked doors--ah, no, no! Her free young body and soul revolted with
nausea at the thought. Death would be better than that. She walked still
more rapidly.

With that possibility impending she shrank from any chance contact with
passers-by, turning into side streets to avoid any one she saw coming.
Once, a policeman, appearing unexpectedly out of the shadows, set her
heart beating wildly, but he passed by without looking at her.

It grew later, and the streets became quite deserted. She had been walking
for more than an hour when she noticed that the houses were scattered,
with open spaces now and then, and a bracing freshness in the air which
suggested that she was getting away from where the herds of London slept,
into open spaces. For some obscure reason this made her nervous, and she
turned back. After a while London closed in on her again, but this time in
a more squalid quarter, a wilderness of dirty narrow streets, where even
in the darkness the debasing marks and odours of squalid poverty were
perceptible in the endless rows of houses which seemed to crowd in upon
her. She came to a bridge and crossed it into an area of gaunt and
darkened factories. Here, strange nocturnal noises and sights frightened
her. She saw shadowy forms, and heard rough voices on a wharf in the
blackness of the river beneath her, followed by a woman's scream. She ran
when she heard that--ran along the riverside till she came to another
bridge, which she recrossed. She found herself in a quieter and better
part of London, where the streets were wide and well-kept, and she
slackened her pace into a walk again.

The night wore on like eternity, with immeasurable slowness yet incredible
swiftness. She had been walking for hours, and yet she had no feeling of
fatigue. She seemed to move through the streets without any effort of her
own. Towards the morning she was carried along with a complete absence of
bodily sensation, as if she had been in very truth