She cursed him in a gasping, spent breath.  Essie looked ill, he thought.  Daniel Culser, listening at the door, made a movement to leave, but the woman prevented him, hanging about his neck.  “No!  No!” she exclaimed.  “It will be all right, I can get it ... more.  Be patient.”  Jasper Penny walked stiffly to the exit, where he paused at the point of repeating his warning.  Essie Scofield was lifting a quivering, tear-drenched face to the vexation of the fashionable youth.  He was attempting to repulse her, but she held him with a desperation of feeling.  The elder descended the stairs without further speech.

Outside, the warmth of the day had continued into dusk.  The mist had thickened, above which, in a momentary rift, he could see the stars swimming in removed constellations.  He was wrapped in an utter loathing of the scene through which he had passed, his undeniable part in it.  It was all hideous beyond words.  His late need, his sense of void and illimitable longing, tormented him ceaselessly.  He was sick with rebellion against life, an affair of cunning traps and mud and fog.  Above the obscured and huddled odium of the city the distances were clear, serene.  Above the degradation ...  Susan.  A tyrannical desire to see her possessed him, an absolute necessity for the purification of her mere presence.  Unconsciously he quickened his step, charged with purpose; but he couldn’t go to the Academy now; it was six o’clock.  He must delay an hour at least.  Habit prompted him to a supper which he left untried on its plates, the lighting of a cigar, quickly cold, forgot.  At seven he hurried resolutely over the dark streets with the dim luminosity of occasional gas lamps floating on the unstirring white gloom.  The bricks under foot were soggy, and the curved sign above her entrance, the bare willows, dropped a pattering moisture.

She saw him immediately, not in the familiar office, but in a hall laid with cold matting and nearly filled by a stairway, lit with a lamp at the further end.  “I am sorry,” she told him; “I have no place to take you.  The rhetoric mistress is correcting papers there,” she indicated the shut door.  He made no immediate answer, content to gaze at her sensitive, appealing countenance.  “It is so warm,” she said finally, colouring at his intentness, “and I have been indoors all day.  I might get my things.  We could, perhaps ... a walk,” she spoke rapidly, her head bent from him.  She drew back, then hesitated.  “Very well,” he replied.  Susan disappeared, but she quickly returned, in a little violet bonnet bound and tied with black, and a dark azure velvet cloak furred at her wrists and throat.  She held a muff doubtfully; but, in the end, took it with her.

Outside, the mist and night enveloped them in a close, damp veil.  They turned silently to the right, passing the narrow mouth of Currant Alley, and Quince Street beyond.  The bricks became precarious, and gave place to a walk of boards; the corners about a broad, muddy way were built up; but farther on the dwellings were scattered—­lighted windows showed dimly behind bare catalpas, iron fences enclosed orderly patches between sodden flats, gas lamps grew fewer.