‘No; now, now.’

Wilderspin looked with a deep sigh at the picture of ’Faith and Love,’ fired by the lights of sunset, where Winnie’s face seemed alive.

‘Well,’ said he, ’as she did not come, I worked at my painting of “Ruth” all day; and on the next morning, as I was starting for Primrose Court to seek her, Mrs. Gudgeon came kicking frantically at the street-door.  When it was opened, she came stamping upstairs, and as I advanced to meet her, she shook her fists in my face, shouting out:  “I could tear your eyes out, you vagabones.”  “Why, what is the matter?” I asked in great surprise.  “You’ve bin and killed her, that’s all,” said the woman, foaming at the mouth.  She then told me that her daughter, almost immediately on reaching home after having left the studio in the company of my servant, had fallen down in a swoon.  A succession of swoons followed.  She never rallied.  She was then lying dead in Primrose Court.’

‘And what then?  Answer me quickly.’

’She asked me to give her money that her daughter might be buried respectably and not by the parish.  I told her it was all hallucination about the girl being her daughter, and that a spiritual body could not be buried, but she seemed so genuinely distressed that I gave her the money.’

‘Spiritual body!  Hallucination!’ I said.  ’I heard her voice in the London streets, and she was seen selling baskets at the theatre door.  Where shall I find the house?’

‘It is of no use for you to go there,’ he said.

‘Nothing shall prevent my going at once.’  A feverish yearning had come upon me to see the body.

‘If you will go,’ said Wilderspin, ’it is No. 2 Primrose Court, Great Queen Street, Holborn.

II

I hurried out of the house, and soon finding a cab I drove to Great Queen Street.

My soul had passed now into another torture-chamber.  It was being torn between two warring, maddening forces—­the passionate desire to see her body, and the shrinking dread of undergoing the ordeal.  At one moment I felt—­as palpably as I felt it, on the betrothal night—­her slim figure, soft as a twine of flowers in my arms:  at the next I was clasping a corpse—­a rigid corpse in rags.  And yet I can scarcely say that I had any thoughts.  At Great Queen Street I dismissed the cab, and had some little difficulty in finding Primrose Court, a miserable narrow alley.  I knocked at a door which, even in that light, I could see was a peculiarly wretched one.  After a considerable delay the door was opened and a face peered out—­the face of the woman whom I had seen in Cyril’s studio.  She did not at first seem to recognise me.  She was evidently far gone in liquor, and looked at me, murmuring, ‘You’re one o’ the cussed body-snatchers; I know you:  you belong to the Rose Alley “Forty Thieves.”  You’ll swing—­every man Jack o’ ye’ll swing yet, mind if you don’t.’