tled around
the corners and pierced chillingly through the thickest wraps, and
passengers strode through the greasy black mud with surly faces and
great-coats and the inevitable London umbrella.

At the window of a dull and dirty little lodging a woman sat, in this
dark gloaming, gazing out at the passers-by. The house had a perpetual
odor of onions and cabbage and dinner, as it is in the nature of such
houses to have, and the room, "first floor front," was in the last
stage of lodging-house shabbiness and discomfort.

The woman was quite alone--a still, dark figure sitting motionless by
the grimy window. She might have been carved in stone, so still she
sat--so still she had sat for more than two hours.

Her dress was black, of the poorest sort, frayed and worn, and she
shivered under a threadbare shawl drawn close around her shoulders.
Yet, in spite of poverty and sickness, and despair and middle age, the
woman was beautiful still, with a dark and haggard and wild sort of
beauty that would have haunted one to one's dying day.

In her youth, and her first freshness and innocence, she must have been
lovely as a dream; but that loveliness was all gone now.

The listless hands lay still, the great, glittering dark eyes stared
blankly at the dingy houses opposite, at the straggling pedestrians, at
the thickening gloom. The short February day was almost night now, the
street-lamps flared yellow and dull athwart the clammy fog.

"Another day," the woman murmured, "another endless day of sick despair
gone. Alone and dying--the most miserable creature on the wide earth.
Oh, great God, who didst forgive Magdalene, have a little pity on me!"

A spasm of fierce anguish crossed her face for an instant, fading away,
and leaving the hopeless despair more hopeless than before.

"I am mad, worse than mad, to hope as I do. She will never look upon
my guilty face--she so pure, so stainless, so sweet--how dare I ask it?
Oh, what happy women there are in the world! Wives who love and are
beloved, and are faithful to the end! And I--think how I drag on
living with all that makes life worth having gone forever, while those
happy ones, whose lives are one blissful dream, are torn by death from
all who love them. To think that I once had a husband, a child, a
home; to think what I am now--to think of it, and not to go mad!"

She laid her face against the cold glass with a miserable groan. "Have
pity on me, oh, Lord! and let