she had had full opportunity to understand why those suburban
stations had been built so large. A dark torrent of human beings,
chiefly men, gathered out of all the streets of the vicinity, had dashed
unceasingly into the enclosure and covered the long platforms with
tramping feet. Every few minutes a train rolled in, as if from some
inexhaustible magazine of trains beyond the horizon, and, sucking into
itself a multitude and departing again, left one platform for one moment
empty,--and the next moment the platform was once more filled by the
quenchless stream. Less frequently, but still often, other trains
thundered through the station on a line removed from platforms, and
these trains too were crammed with dark human beings, frowning in study
over white newspapers. For even in 1880 the descent upon London from the
suburbs was a formidable phenomenon. Train after train fled downwards
with its freight towards the hidden city, and the torrent still surged,
more rapid than ever, through the narrow gullet of the station. It was
like the flight of some enormous and excited population from a country
menaced with disaster.

Borne on and buffeted by the torrent, Hilda had seen a well-dressed
epileptic youth, in charge of an elderly woman, approaching the station.
He had passed slowly close by her, as she modestly waited in her hasty
mourning, and she had had a fearful vision of his idiotic greenish face
supported somehow like a mask at the summit of that shaky structure of
limbs. He had indeed stared at her with his apelike eyes. She had
watched him, almost shuddering, till he was lost amid the heedless crowd
within. Then, without waiting longer for her relative, without
reflecting upon what she did, she had walked tremblingly back to the
Cedars, checked by tributaries of the torrent at every street corner....

She had known nothing of the funeral. She had not had speech with the
relative. She was in bed, somehow. The day had elapsed. And in the
following night, when she was alone and quite awake, she had become
aware that she, she herself, was that epileptic shape; that that
epileptic shape was lying in her bed and that there was none other in
the bed. Nor was this a fancy of madness! She knew that she was not mad,
that she was utterly sane; and the conviction of sanity only intensified
her awful discovery. She passed a trembling hand over her face, and felt
the skin corrupt and green. Gazing into the darkness, she knew that