The lamps at night seemed twinkling, blinking in a callous consciousness of my tragedy--my monstrous tragedy of real life, the like of which no poet dare imagine. But what aroused my wrath to an unbearable pitch--what determined me to leave London at once--was the sight of the unsympathetic faces in the streets. Though sympathy could have given me no comfort, the myriad unsympathetic eyes of London infuriated me. 'Died in beggar's rags--died in a hovel!' I muttered with rage as the equipages and coarse splendours of the West End rolled insolently by. 'Died in a hovel!--and this London, this vast, ridiculous, swarming human ant-hill, whose millions of paltry humdrum lives were not worth one breath from those lips--this London spurned her, left her to perish alone in her squalor and misery.' Cyril and Wilderspin had returned to the Continent. D'Arcy was still away. I made application to the Home Secretary to have the pauper grave opened. On the ground that I was 'not a relative of the deceased,' the officials refused to institute even preliminary inquiries. During this time no news of Mrs. Gudgeon had come to me through Polly Onion, and I determined to go to Primrose Court and see what had become of her. When I reached Primrose Court I found that the shutters of the house were up. Knocking and getting no response, I ascertained from a pot-boy who was passing the corner of the court that Mrs. Gudgeon had decamped. Neither the pot-boy nor any one in the court could tell me whither she was gone. 'But where is Polly Onion?' I asked anxiously; for I was beginning to blame myself bitterly for having neglected them. 'I can tell you where poor Polly is,' said the pot-boy. 'She's in the New North Cemetery. She fell downstairs and broke her neck.' 'Why, she lived downstairs,' I said. 'That's true; you seem to be well up in the family, sir. But Poll couldn't pay her rent, so old Meg took her in. And on the very morning when Meg and Poll were a-startin' off together into the country--it was quite early and dark--Poll stumbles over three young flower-gals as 'ad crep' in the front door in the night time and was makin' the stairs their bed. Gals as hadn't made enough to pay for their night's lodgin' often used to sleep on Meg's stairs. Poll was picked up as nigh dead as a toucher, and she died at the 'ospital.' Toiling in the revolving cage of Circumstance, I strove in vain against that most appalling form of envy--the envy of one's fellow creatures that they should live and breathe while there is no breath of life for the _one_. My uncle Cecil's death had made me a rich man; but what was wealth to me if it could not buy me respite from the vision haunting me day and night--the vision of the attic, the mattress, and the woman?