After that the two women sat silent for a time,—Bessie holding Heather’s hand, and Heather stroking Bessie’s hair gently and thoughtfully. Little more than twelve months before, Heather had told Alick she did not know much about wickedness herself, and behold, already she was coming dimly to understand, that no human comprehension of life can be perfect, the boundaries of which exclude from sight, all evil, all passion, all temptation, all repentance, all despair. CHAPTER IX. DIFFICULTIES. The new year brought with it no increase of business to the Protector Bread and Flour Company. On the contrary, several pairs of stones were standing idle at Stangate, and night-work was now a thing unheard of. Many men were discharged on account of “slackness,” and the labour of those that remained resulted rather in the accumulation of stock than in the execution of orders. Orders to be executed had become, in fact, few and far between. As for the bakehouse, it happened fortunately, perhaps, that no gentlemen of the press desired to see it in the later days of which I am writing, for it had become like one of those places in Pompeii, where, although the implements and utensils necessary for carrying on a trade still exist, the trade itself is a memory. Six months in London being about equivalent to six hundred years in Pompeii, the once busy court-yard and works now resembled nothing so much as a City of the Dead. Over the Protector something worse than lava had flowed; and, although there was stock everywhere,—stock, and to spare—wheat in quantity, sacks and sacks of flour, still every one looked gloomy,—every one felt that “things were going queer.” Half of the vans were now never pulled out of the sheds; a large number of the horses—creatures that, as we know, eat their heads off when standing idle in the stable—were sent to Gower’s and sold there by public auction; stripped of their fine liveries, many of the “Company’s servants” were now driving unornamental carts about the City, thankful to earn their guinea a week and supplemental pots of beer, wherever such terms were obtainable; most of the Company’s depôts were closed, and had large bills stuck upon the shutters, signifying “that these desirable premises were TO LET;” the rounds were shorter than of old, and the men now stopped to get half-pints of ale anywhere they liked without reprimand or dismissal. A cloud of general depression had settled down upon the directors, the shareholders, and the employés of the Company; there was nothing much doing at Stangate, and there was less in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. About the former establishment, Mr. Robert Crossenham walked disconsolately with his hands in his pockets; before the fire, in the latter, Arthur Dudley read the _Times_ diligently, and smoked the last Havannas he was ever likely to have presented to him free of charge.