There came a time when her legs refused to carry her further; her head throbbed violently; a dark veil seemed to gradually blot out things as she knew them.  She remembered no more.

When next she became dimly conscious, she seemed to be in a recumbent position in a strange room, where she was watching the doings of a woman who was unknown to her.

When Mavis first set eyes on this person, she appeared to be a decent, comely, fair-haired, youngish woman, who was dressed in the becoming black of one who had recently emerged from the mourning of widowhood.  But as Mavis watched the woman, a startling transformation took place before her eyes.  The woman began by removing her gloves and bonnet before a dressing glass, which was kept in position by a mangy hair brush thrust between the frame and its supports.  Then, to the girl’s wondering astonishment, the woman unpinned and took off her fair curls, revealing a mop of tangled, frowsy, colourless hair, which the wig had concealed.  Next, she removed her sober, well-cut costume, also, her silk underskirt, to put on a much worn, greasy dressing-gown.  Then, she pulled off her pretty shoes and silk stockings, to thrust her feet into worn slippers, through which her naked toes showed in more than one place.

Mavis rubbed her eyes; she expected every moment to find herself again in the street, clinging to the railings for support, at which moment of returning sense she would know that what she was now witnessing would prove to be an effect of her disordered imagination.

If what she saw were the result of a sick brain, it was a convincing, consistent picture which fascinated her attention.

The woman had taken up a not over-clean towel, to dip a corner of it in a jug upon the washstand before applying it to one side of her face.  Mavis suffered her eyes to leave the woman in order to wander round the room.  She was lying on a sofa at the foot of an iron bed.  That part of the wall nearest to her was filled by the fireplace, in which a cheerful fire was burning; it looked as if it had recently been made up.  Upon the mantelshelf were faded photographs of common, self-conscious people, the tops of which all but touched a framed print of the late Mr Gladstone.  In the complementary recess to the one in which the washstand stood, was a table littered with odds and ends of food, some of which were still wrapped in the paper in which they had come from the shop.  A smoking oil lamp, of which the glass shade had disappeared, and which was now shaded with the lid of a cardboard shoe box, cast elongated shadows of the occupier of the room on walls and ceiling as she moved.  The atmosphere of the room was heavy with the mingled smell of paraffin oil and fugginess.

“Where—­where am I?” asked Mavis.

“You’ve come round, then?” said the woman, who had just cleansed one side of her face of artificial complexion.

“How did I get here?”