After a while Lessingham spoke again, as if half to himself and half to me.

’This mention of the shrieks on the railway, and of the wailing noise in the cab,—­what must this wretch have done to her?  How my darling must have suffered!’

That was a theme on which I myself scarcely ventured to allow my thoughts to rest.  The notion of a gently-nurtured girl being at the mercy of that fiend incarnate, possessed—­as I believed that so-called Arab to be possessed—­of all the paraphernalia of horror and of dread, was one which caused me tangible shrinkings of the body.  Whence had come those shrieks and yells, of which the writer of the report spoke, which had caused the Arab’s fellow-passengers to think that murder was being done?  What unimaginable agony had caused them? what speechless torture?  And the ‘wailing noise,’ which had induced the prosaic, indurated London cabman to get twice off his box to see what was the matter, what anguish had been provocative of that?  The helpless girl who had already endured so much, endured, perhaps, that to which death would have been preferred!—­shut up in that rattling, jolting box on wheels, alone with that diabolical Asiatic, with the enormous bundle, which was but the lurking place of nameless terrors,—­what might she not, while being borne through the heart of civilised London, have been made to suffer?  What had she not been made to suffer to have kept up that continued ‘wailing noise’?

It was not a theme on which it was wise to permit one’s thoughts to linger,—­and particularly was it clear that it was one from which Lessingham’s thoughts should have been kept as far as possible away.

’Come, Mr Lessingham, neither you nor I will do himself any good by permitting his reflections to flow in a morbid channel.  Let us talk of something else.  By the way, weren’t you due to speak in the House to-night?’

‘Due!—­Yes, I was due,—­but what does it matter?’

’But have you acquainted no one with the cause of your non-attendance?’

‘Acquaint!—­whom should I acquaint?’

’My good sir!  Listen to me, Mr Lessingham.  Let me entreat you very earnestly, to follow my advice.  Call another cab,—­or take this! and go at once to the House.  It is not too late.  Play the man, deliver the speech you have undertaken to deliver, perform your political duties.  By coming with me you will be a hindrance rather than a help, and you may do your reputation an injury from which it never may recover.  Do as I counsel you, and I will undertake to do my very utmost to let you have good news by the time your speech is finished.’

He turned on me with a bitterness for which I was unprepared.

’If I were to go down to the House, and try to speak in the state in which I am now, they would laugh at me, I should be ruined.’

’Do you not run an equally great risk of being ruined by staying away?’

He gripped me by the arm.