My soul had passed now into another torture-chamber. It was being torn between two warring, maddening forces--the passionate desire to see her body, and the shrinking dread of undergoing the ordeal. At one moment I felt--as palpably as I felt it, on the betrothal night--her slim figure, soft as a twine of flowers in my arms: at the next I was clasping a corpse--a rigid corpse in rags. And yet I can scarcely say that I had any thoughts. At Great Queen Street I dismissed the cab, and had some little difficulty in finding Primrose Court, a miserable narrow alley. I knocked at a door which, even in that light, I could see was a peculiarly wretched one. After a considerable delay the door was opened and a face peered out--the face of the woman whom I had seen in Cyril's studio. She did not at first seem to recognise me. She was evidently far gone in liquor, and looked at me, murmuring, 'You're one o' the cussed body-snatchers; I know you: you belong to the Rose Alley "Forty Thieves." You'll swing--every man Jack o' ye'll swing yet, mind if you don't.' At the sight of the squalid house in which Winifred had lived and died I passed into a new world of horror. Dead matter had become conscious, and for a second or two it was not the human being before me, but the rusty iron, the broken furniture, the great patches of brick and dirty mortar where the plaster had fallen from the walls,--it was these which seemed to have life--a terrible life--and to be talking to me, telling me what I dared not listen to about the triumph of evil over good. I knew that the woman was still speaking, but for a time I heard no sound--my senses could receive no impressions save from the sinister eloquence of the dead and yet living matter around me. Not an object there that did not seem charged with the wicked message of the heartless Fates. At length, and as I stood upon the doorstep, a trembling, a mighty expectance, seized me like an ague-fit; and I heard myself saying, 'I am come to see the body, Mrs. Gudgeon.' Then I saw her peer, blinking, into my face, as she said, 'Oh, oh, it's _you_, is it? It's one o' the lot as keeps the studeros, is it?--the cussed Chelsea lot as killed her. I recklet yer a-starin' at the goddess Joker! So you've come to see my poor darter's body, are you? How werry kind, to be sure! Pray come in, gentleman, an' pray let the beautiful goddess Joker be perlite an' show sich a nice kind wisiter the way upstairs.' She took a candle, and with a mincing, mocking movement, curtseying low at every step, she backed before me, and then stood waiting at the foot of the staircase with a drunken look of satire on her features. 'Pray go upstairs fust, gentleman,' said she; 'I can't think o' goin' up fust, an' lettin' my darter's kind wisiter foller behind like a sarvint. I 'opes we knows our manners better nor that comes to in Primrose Court.' 'None of this foolery now, woman,' said I. 'There's a time for everything, you know.'