‘Hiram Grewgious, Esquire, Staple Inn, London.’  This was all Rosa knew of her destination; but it was enough to send her rattling away again in a cab, through deserts of gritty streets, where many people crowded at the corner of courts and byways to get some air, and where many other people walked with a miserably monotonous noise of shuffling of feet on hot paving-stones, and where all the people and all their surroundings were so gritty and so shabby!

There was music playing here and there, but it did not enliven the case.  No barrel-organ mended the matter, and no big drum beat dull care away.  Like the chapel bells that were also going here and there, they only seemed to evoke echoes from brick surfaces, and dust from everything.  As to the flat wind-instruments, they seemed to have cracked their hearts and souls in pining for the country.

Her jingling conveyance stopped at last at a fast-closed gateway, which appeared to belong to somebody who had gone to bed very early, and was much afraid of housebreakers; Rosa, discharging her conveyance, timidly knocked at this gateway, and was let in, very little bag and all, by a watchman.

‘Does Mr. Grewgious live here?’

‘Mr. Grewgious lives there, Miss,’ said the watchman, pointing further in.

So Rosa went further in, and, when the clocks were striking ten, stood on P. J. T.’s doorsteps, wondering what P. J. T. had done with his street-door.

Guided by the painted name of Mr. Grewgious, she went up-stairs and softly tapped and tapped several times.  But no one answering, and Mr. Grewgious’s door-handle yielding to her touch, she went in, and saw her guardian sitting on a window-seat at an open window, with a shaded lamp placed far from him on a table in a corner.

Rosa drew nearer to him in the twilight of the room.  He saw her, and he said, in an undertone:  ‘Good Heaven!’

Rosa fell upon his neck, with tears, and then he said, returning her embrace: 

’My child, my child!  I thought you were your mother!—­But what, what, what,’ he added, soothingly, ’has happened?  My dear, what has brought you here?  Who has brought you here?’

‘No one.  I came alone.’

‘Lord bless me!’ ejaculated Mr. Grewgious.  ’Came alone!  Why didn’t you write to me to come and fetch you?’

‘I had no time.  I took a sudden resolution.  Poor, poor Eddy!’

‘Ah, poor fellow, poor fellow!’

‘His uncle has made love to me.  I cannot bear it,’ said Rosa, at once with a burst of tears, and a stamp of her little foot; ’I shudder with horror of him, and I have come to you to protect me and all of us from him, if you will?’

‘I will,’ cried Mr. Grewgious, with a sudden rush of amazing energy.  ’Damn him!

“Confound his politics! 
Frustrate his knavish tricks! 
On Thee his hopes to fix? 
Damn him again!"’

After this most extraordinary outburst, Mr. Grewgious, quite beside himself, plunged about the room, to all appearance undecided whether he was in a fit of loyal enthusiasm, or combative denunciation.