ick of half-closing his eyes when he looked at
anything, not screwing them up as seamen do, but appearing rather to
drop a film over them like the inner eyelid of a bird. The woman's
eyes resembled a hare's, being brown and big, and set far back, so
that she seemed at times to be looking right behind her. She wore a
faded look, from her dust-coloured hair to her boots, which wanted
blacking.

"It all seems so wide," she began; "so wide--"

"I'm going west," said the man, and started at a slow walk.
Eve followed, a pace behind his heels, treading almost in his tracks.
He went on, taking no notice of her.

"How long were you in there?" she asked, after a while.

"Ten year'." Adam spoke without looking back. "'Cumulated jobs, you
know."

"I was only two. Blankets it was with me. They recommended me to
mercy."

"You got it," Adam commented, with his eyes fastened ahead.

The fog followed them as they turned into a street full of traffic.
Its frayed edge rose and sank, was parted and joined again--now
descending to the first-storey windows and blotting out the cabmen
and passengers on omnibus tops, now rolling up and over the parapets
of the houses and the sky-signs. It was noticeable that in the crowd
that hustled along the pavement Adam moved like a puppy not yet
waywise, but with lifted face, while Eve followed with her head bent,
seeing nothing but his heels. She observed that his boots were
hardly worn at all.

Three or four times, as they went along, Adam would eye a shop window
and turn in at the door, while Eve waited. He returned from
different excursions with a twopenny loaf, a red sausage, a pipe, box
of lights and screw of tobacco, and a noggin or so of gin in an old
soda-water bottle. Once they turned aside into a public, and had a
drink of gin together. Adam paid.

Thus for two hours they plodded westward, and the fog and crowd were
with them all the way--strangers jostling them by the shoulder on the
greasy pavement, hansoms splashing the brown mud over them--the same
din for miles. Many shops were lighting up, and from these a yellow
flare streamed into the fog; or a white when it came from the
electric light; or separate beams of orange, green, and violet, when
the shop was a druggist's.

Then they came to the railings of Hyde Park, and trudged down the
hill alongside them to Kensington Gardens. It was yet early in the
afternoon. Adam pulled up.

"Come and look," he said. "It's