I sat up, black with rage. My stranger's face glimmered obscurely in the gloom.
"Oh, if you spy on me again!" I rasped at him, "'live without me,' what do I care?--you can go and----"
But, thank God, the _die without me_ was never uttered. I haven't _that_ to haunt me. Some hidden strength that had been mine these few days melted away like water. "Not now; not now!" I entreated him. I hastened away.
And then--well, life plays strange tricks. In a week or two London had swallowed me up. How many times, I wonder, had I tried in fancy to picture Mrs Monnerie's town house. How romantic an edifice fancy had made of it. Impressive in its own fashion, it fell far short of these ignorant dreams. It was No. 2 of about forty, set side by side, their pillared porticoes fronting a prodigious square. Its only "garden," chiefly the resort of cats, children, nursemaids, an old whiskered gentleman in a bath chair, and sparrows, was visible to every passer-by through a spear-headed palisade of railings. Broad paving-stones skirted its areas, and over each descent of steps hung a bell-pull.
On cloudless days the sun filled this square like a tank with a dry glare and heat in which even my salamanderish body sometimes gasped like a fish out of water. When rain fell out of the low, grey skies, and the scaling plane-trees hissed and the sparrows chirped, my spirits seemed to sink into my shoes. And fair or foul, London soot and dust were enemies alike to my eyes, my fingers, and my nose.
Even my beloved cloud-burdened north-west wind was never quite free of smuts and grit; and when blew the east! But it must be remembered how ignorant and local I was. In my long carriage journey to Mrs Monnerie's through those miles and miles of grimed, huddling houses, those shops and hoardings and steeples, I had realized for the first time that its capital is not a part of _England_, only a sprawling human growth in it; and though I soon learned to respect it as _that_, I could never see without a sigh some skimpy weed struggling for life in its bricked-up crevices. It was nearly all dead, except for human beings, and that could not be said of Lyndsey, or even of Beechwood Hill.
Maybe my imagination had already been prejudiced by a coloured drawing which Mr Wagginhorne had sent me once for a Valentine when I was a child. It hangs up now in that child's nursery for a memento that I have been nearly dead. In the midst of it on a hill, in gold and faded carmine, encircled with great five-pointed blue stars, and with green, grooved valleys radiating from its castellated towers, is a city--_Hierusalem_. A city surmounted by a narrow wreathing pennon on which, inscribed in silver, are the words: "Who heareth the Voice of My Spirit? And how shall they who deceive themselves resort unto Me?"