Page:The Better Sort (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1903).djvu/422

THE BETTER SORT it was the instinct of watching and waiting till she should see how great the danger might become. And she had moreover another reason, which we shall presently learn. The extra-specials meanwhile were to be had in Kilburnia almost as soon as in the Strand; the little ponied and painted carts, tipped at an extraordinary angle, by which they were disseminated, had for that matter, she observed, never rattled up the Edgware Road at so furious a rate. Each evening, it was true, when the flare of Fleet Street would have begun really to smoke, she had, in resistance to old habit, a little to hold herself; but for three successive days she tided over that crisis. It was not till the fourth night that her reaction suddenly declared itself, determined as it partly was by the latest poster that dangled free at the door of a small shop just out of her own street. The establishment dealt in buttons, pins, tape, and silver bracelets, but the branch of its industry she patronised was that of telegrams, stamps, stationery, and the "Edinburgh rock" offered to the appetite of the several small children of her next-door neighbour but one. "The Beadel-Muffet Mystery, Startling Disclosures, Action of the Treasury"—at these words she anxiously gazed; after which she decided. It was as if from her hilltop, from her very house-top, to which the window of her little room was contiguous, she had seen the red light in the east. It had, this time, its colour. She went on, she went far, till she met a cab, which she hailed, "regardless," she felt, as she had hailed one after leaving Bight by the river. "To Fleet Street" she simply said, and it took her—that she felt too—back into life.

Yes, it was life again, bitter, doubtless, but with a taste, when, having stopped her cab, short of her indication, in Covent Garden, she walked across southward and to the top of the street in which she and her friend had last parted with Mortimer Marshal. She 410