-light over each
broad door admitted the sun to the halls of a lodging-house keeper only.
The lamp-posts were still those that had done duty with oil lights; and
rheumatic old coachmen and postilions, that once had driven and ridden
gloriously from London to Land's End, ornamented with their bent persons
and bow legs the pavement in front of the chief inn, in the sorry hope of
earning sixpence to keep body and soul together.

'We are kept well informed on the time o' day, my lady,' said Mrs. Green,
as she pulled down the blinds in Lady Constantine's room on the evening
of their arrival. 'There's a church exactly at the back of us, and I
hear every hour strike.'

Lady Constantine said she had noticed that there was a church quite near.

'Well, it is better to have that at the back than other folks' winders.
And if your ladyship wants to go there it won't be far to walk.'

'That's what occurred to me,' said Lady Constantine, '_if_ I should want
to go.'

During the ensuing days she felt to the utmost the tediousness of waiting
merely that time might pass. Not a soul knew her there, and she knew not
a soul, a circumstance which, while it added to her sense of secrecy,
intensified her solitude. Occasionally she went to a shop, with Green as
her companion. Though there were purchases to be made, they were by no
means of a pressing nature, and but poorly filled up the vacancies of
those strange, speculative days,--days surrounded by a shade of fear, yet
poetized by sweet expectation.

On the thirteenth day she told Green that she was going to take a walk,
and leaving the house she passed by the obscurest streets to the Abbey.
After wandering about beneath the aisles till her courage was screwed to
its highest, she went out at the other side, and, looking timidly round
to see if anybody followed, walked on till she came to a certain door,
which she reached just at the moment when her heart began to sink to its
very lowest, rendering all the screwing up in vain.

Whether it was because the month was October, or from any other reason,
the deserted aspect of the quarter in general sat especially on this
building. Moreover the pavement was up, and heaps of stone and gravel
obstructed the footway. Nobody was coming, nobody was going, in that
thoroughfare; she appeared to be the single one of the human race bent
upon marriage business, which seemed to have been unanimously abandoned
by all the rest of the world as proven