A kind of exultation seized her at this unexpected deliverance from her adventure, but that mood passed as she reflected upon her present position.  She had left the house without her few belongings, and what was far worse, without her money, which she kept in a hand-bag locked up in her small case in the bedroom she had just left.

She had not a penny in the world, and she dared not go back.

That was not the moment to reflect upon the grimness of her situation.  The sound of approaching footsteps shaped her fears of capture into renewed action.  She walked rapidly away.

The time was near midnight, and the streets were almost empty.  She kept her way along dark obscure streets, shunning the lighted thoroughfares.  She had no settled plan in her mind, except to keep on.  Hers was the instinct of the hunted creature for darkness and obscurity.  Her fevered spirit hurried her along, spurring her with the menace of an imprisonment which was worse than the cramped horror of the grave.  In the grave there was no consciousness of the weight of the earth above, but in prison, held like an animal, watched by horrible men, beating despairing hands against locked doors—­ah, no, no!  Her free young body and soul revolted with nausea at the thought.  Death would be better than that.  She walked still more rapidly.

With that possibility impending she shrank from any chance contact with passers-by, turning into side streets to avoid any one she saw coming.  Once, a policeman, appearing unexpectedly out of the shadows, set her heart beating wildly, but he passed by without looking at her.

It grew later, and the streets became quite deserted.  She had been walking for more than an hour when she noticed that the houses were scattered, with open spaces now and then, and a bracing freshness in the air which suggested that she was getting away from where the herds of London slept, into open spaces.  For some obscure reason this made her nervous, and she turned back.  After a while London closed in on her again, but this time in a more squalid quarter, a wilderness of dirty narrow streets, where even in the darkness the debasing marks and odours of squalid poverty were perceptible in the endless rows of houses which seemed to crowd in upon her.  She came to a bridge and crossed it into an area of gaunt and darkened factories.  Here, strange nocturnal noises and sights frightened her.  She saw shadowy forms, and heard rough voices on a wharf in the blackness of the river beneath her, followed by a woman’s scream.  She ran when she heard that—­ran along the riverside till she came to another bridge, which she recrossed.  She found herself in a quieter and better part of London, where the streets were wide and well-kept, and she slackened her pace into a walk again.