e flowers in it, the one bright spot of colour in the dingy
chamber. He took this in his disengaged hand, and nodding and smiling
anew at the pretty girl's portrait, he turned about again, and walked
into a bedroom beyond a narrow and inconvenient little window. The
strident voice of the clock over the entrance of the old Hall, answered
or anticipated from multitudinous spires in the City far and near,
sounded as Philip entered his bedroom. He stood and listened, counting
six jarring strokes. The bedroom was a microscopic apartment, with as
many corners in it as any room of its size in London, and the bed itself
was a perfect triumph of littleness, so tucked under the sloping roof,
and so surrounded by projecting corners, as to make the entry to it or
the exit from it a gymnastic performance of considerable merit. The room
was not over-light at the best of times, the fourth part of the space
of one small window in the sloping wall was filled by its own heavy
framework, and for half its height it was shielded by a parapet, which
had at least its uses in hiding the occupant of the room from the
too-curious observation of those who dwelt in the upper stories of the
houses opposite. These houses opposite, compared with Gable Inn, are
of a mushroom modernness, and yet are old enough (having begun with
a debauched and sickly constitution) to have fallen into an almost
complete decrepitude. Their stately neighbour seems to be less grimy
with the London smoke than they are, has always been less susceptible to
outside evil influences, even of that unescapable sort, and drives them
to an added shabbiness of senility by contrast with its own hale old
age. The bedroom window was already open for the admission of such fresh
air as, disguised in London blacks, the exhalations of moist spring
pavements, and the reeking odours of the cuisine of Fleeter's Rents,
might choose to wander thither. Philip, with the lamp in one hand and
the tumbler of flowers in the other, put out his head and looked into
the squalid depths below him, and having gazed there a while absently
and with no object, drew back with a vague touch of pity upon him for
the people who dwelt in so much squalor so near to healthy effort and
reasonable competence. He could hardly have told as much, perhaps, but
one pallid countenance, shining very dimly at an open window, was very
much answerable for that vague touch of pity. The face in the darkness
started away from the wi