He felt considerably depressed--a state of mind to which the weather in its especial degree contributed. The day had opened with a brooding menace of fog--a threat amply justified in the sequel. Hour by hour, as the morning wore on, the squalid cloud had drooped and thickened, until now, at one o’clock in the afternoon, the street lamps were all alight and the shops blazing like dull furnaces. So motionless and so heavy grew the atmosphere that to breathe became a physical consciousness, and one almost felt the process going on in one’s lungs of selection and rejection, with a gasp now and again over a mistaken choice. If all the world, according to the poet, had been a stage, nature could not have come more equal to the occasion with a mise-en-scène of cloud-castles and a ‘make-up’ pencil better adapted to paint every eye with a sooty rim. For some reason--for which he neither accounted, nor troubled to account to himself--the discomfited and vaguely uneasy young gentleman turned his steps towards the Vauxhall Bridge Road. Perhaps he still entertained a forlorn hope of somehow justifying himself, to himself and to Mrs Baxter, in his venture; perhaps a mere morbid desire, common enough in its attraction, to visit the spot of a murdered delusion impelled him. He felt sore, and at the same time unaccountably troubled. It seemed to him now that he had allowed himself to be convinced over readily. In any case it was his instinct to fulfil a promise to the letter, or to what his chivalrous conscience chose to consider the letter. At the corner of Dorset Street, after what appeared to him an interminable groping down a murky sewer, he found the house he sought. The fog was so thick, that, peering over the area railings, he could distinguish few of its details; but he could just make out that it was a corner house of a long row, and superficially in nowise superior to its neighbours in general dullness and unattractiveness. Why should it be indeed? And then suddenly he observed that a bill was pasted within one of its shuttered windows. He found the gate, opened it, and entered to read. “_To be let. Furnished. Apply etc._” The name of a local house-agent was given at the foot. Now what prompted him to the act Gilead never knew; but in a moment he had decided to procure the key of the house and enter to make an examination. On his difficult way to the address given he ran across a friend, who particularly desired a talk with him. “One minute,” said Gilead, and, running in to the agent’s stated his wishes. “I am in a hurry,” he said. “Would it trouble you to send the key on to my office?” His name asked and given, the agent was all smiles. “Certainly, Mr Balm--O, most certainly, sir! Would you wish our representative to accompany you?” “No, no. Send the key, and I will choose my own time.”