The cab received them into its musty interior and drove them through the foggy brown of a London winter dawn.  Unimaginable cheerlessness enveloped them.  The world wore an air of disgust at having to get up on such a morning.  The atmosphere for thirty yards around them was clear enough, with the clearness of yellow consomme, but ahead it stood thick, like a puree of bad vegetables.  They passed through Belgravia, and the white-blinded houses gave an impression of universal death, and the empty streets seemed waiting for the doors to open and the mourners to issue forth.  The cab, too, had something of the sinister, in that it was haunted by the ghosts of a fourpenny cigar and a sixpenny bottle of scent which continued a lugubrious flirtation; and the windows rattled a danse macabre.  At last it pulled up at the door of Emmy’s Mansions in Chelsea.

She looked at him very piteously, like a frightened child.  Her pretty mouth was never strong, but when the corners drooped it was babyish.  She slipped her hand in his.

“Don’t leave me just yet.  It’s silly, I know—­but this awful journey has taken everything out of me.  Every bit of it has been worse than the last.  Edith—­that’s my maid—­will light a fire—­you must get warm before you start—­and she’ll make some coffee.  Oh, do come.  You can keep the cab.”

“But what will your maid think?” asked Septimus, who for all his vagueness had definite traditions as to the proprieties of life.

“What does it matter?  What does anything in this ghastly world matter?  I’m frightened, Septimus, horribly frightened.  I daren’t go up by myself.  Oh!  Come!”

Her voice broke on the last word.  Saint Anthony would have yielded; also his pig.  Septimus handed her out of the cab, and telling the cabman to wait, followed her through the already opened front door of the Mansions up to her flat.  She let herself in with her latchkey and showed him into the drawing-room, turning on the electric light as he entered.

“I’ll go and wake Edith,” she said.  “Then we can have some breakfast.  The fire’s laid.  Do you mind putting a match to it?”

She disappeared and Septimus knelt down before the grate and lit the paper.  In a second or two the flame caught the wood, and, the blower being down, it blazed fiercely.  He spread his ice-cold hands out before it, incurious of the futile little room whose draperies and fripperies and inconsiderable flimsiness of furniture proclaimed its owner, intent only on the elemental need of warmth.  He was disturbed by the tornadic entrance of Emmy.

“She’s not here!” she exclaimed tragically.  Her baby face was white and there were dark shadows under the eyes which stared at him with a touch of madness.  “She’s not here!”

“Perhaps she has gone out for a walk,” Septimus suggested, as if London serving-maids were in the habit of taking the air at eight o’clock on a foggy morning.