"If R.M. met me casually in the street, he wouldn't look at me twice--no man would," she exclaimed with a sigh, as she turned away from the glass, "I am horribly ordinary. The only thing is--if I could screw up my courage to answer him--and then to meet him--he might like to find a girl who didn't want anything but a quiet home; who would be satisfied to go without gaiety or amusement." She sighed again, and a wistful look crept into her eyes. "I haven't really ever had any fun, so I shouldn't miss it, and I could just try to make a happy home for R.M., if that is all he wants. And--after all," she went on, still speaking aloud, "there isn't any harm in answering his letter. It may all come to nothing; and yet--it might be worth while--and--it almost seems presidential that I just happened to see that paragraph in the _Sunday Recorder_." The letter she sat down to write as the outcome of all these conflicting meditations, was the most difficult she had ever written in her young life; and before it was finished, and finally consigned to its envelope, she had torn up many sheets of paper, and allowed fully two hours of the morning to pass by. Twelve o'clock was chiming from all the clocks in the neighbourhood, when, with her answers to some of the other advertisements in her hand, she once more pinned on her hat, and ran downstairs to the post. The fog had thickened considerably during the morning, and Christina found the street lamps alight--tiny points of brightness set high above the prevailing gloom, and producing very little effect upon the darkness. Indeed, there was something almost bewildering about those far-off lights; they seemed to heighten, rather than diminish, the all-pervading blackness, which deepened every moment. The girl walked slowly, feeling her way along the area railings, and guiding herself as far as possible by the rumble of traffic along the roadway, though the confusion of sounds made even this guidance a very uncertain one. Drivers shouted, horses slipped and stumbled; and the shrill voices of boys carrying flaring torches, added to the pandemonium. Earlier in the morning the fog had merely been of the familiar yellow variety known to every Londoner. It was now a black and total darkness that seemed to engulf the world. To cross the road to the pillar-box was a matter of no small difficulty, but Christina, with a dogged determination not to be outwitted by the elements, stepped off the kerb and into the seething mass of carts, cabs, and other vehicles, that jostled and struggled with one another in apparently inextricable confusion. On the far side of the street she plunged into a comparatively quiet square, where the fog had lifted somewhat, and was no longer of such Cimmerian blackness, but merely a drifting and bewildering white mist.