not consider her to be a respectable applicant.  At the last at which she called, she was asked to write her name in the hotel book.  She commenced to write Mavis Keeves, but remembered that she had decided to call herself Mrs Kenrick while in London.  She crossed out what she had written, to substitute the name she had elected to bear.  Whether or not this correction made the hotel people suspicious, she was soon informed that she could not be accommodated.  Mavis, heartsore and weary, went out into the night.  A different class of person to the one that she had met earlier in the evening began to infest the streets.  Bold-eyed women, dressed in cheap finery, appeared here and there, either singly or in pairs.  The vague, yet familiar fear, which she had experienced when she began to look for rooms, again took possession of her with gradually increasing force.  She was soon on such familiar terms with this obsession, that she remembered when and how it had first originated in her mind.  It was after her adventure with Mrs Hamilton and her chance meeting with the never-to-be-forgotten Mrs Ewer, when a horrid fear of London had possessed her soul.  Now she saw, even plainer than before, the deep pitfalls and foul morasses which ever menace the feet of unprotected girls in London who have to earn their daily bread.  If it were an effort for her to snatch a living from the great industrial machine when she was last in London, now, in her condition, it was practically hopeless to look for work.  Mind and body were paralysed by a great fear.  To add to her discomfiture, the rain again began to fall.  Scarcely knowing what she was doing, she walked up a pathway, running parallel with the road, which flanked a row of forlorn-looking houses.  Here she felt so faint that she was compelled to cling to the railings to save herself from falling.  Two children passed, one of whom carried a jug, who stopped to stare at her.

“Please!” called Mavis weakly, at which one of the children approached her.

“Can you tell me where I can get a room?”

“I’ll ask fader,” replied the child, who spoke with a German accent.

Mavis remembered little beyond waiting an eternity of suspense, and then of being assisted into a house, up a flight of stairs to a room where she sank on the nearest thing handy.  She opened her frock to clutch, as if for protection, the ring Perigal had given her, and which she always wore suspended on her heart.  Then she was overtaken by unconsciousness.

When she awoke, she rubbed her eyes again and again, whilst a horrible pungent smell affected her nostrils.  She could scarcely believe that she had got to where she found herself.  She saw by the morning light, which was feebly straggling into the room, that she was lying, fully dressed, on an untidy, dirty bed.  The room looked so abjectly wretched that she sprang from her resting-place and attempted to draw the curtains, in order to take complete stock of her surroundings—­attempted, because the dark, cheap cretonne, of which they were made, refused to move, their tops being nailed to the upper woodwork of the window by tintacks.  She tried the second window (the room boasted two), with the same result, owing to a like cause.  For her safety’s sake, she was relieved to find that the room overlooked the Euston Road.