When Lucy came out of Mrs. Morgenstern's, if she had only gone the other way, she would have met Poppie coming round the next corner. After Lucy had vanished, Poppie had found a penny in the gutter, had bought a fresh roll with it and given the half of it to a child younger than herself, whom she met at the back of the Marylebone police station, and after contemplating the neighboring church-yard through the railings while they ate their roll together, and comparing this resting-place of the dead with the grand Baker Street Cemetery, she had judged it time to scamper back to the neighborhood of Wyvil Place, that she might have a chance of seeing the beautiful lady as she came out again. As she turned the corner she saw her walking away toward the station, and after following her till she entered it, scudded off for the city, and arrived in the neighborhood of Guild Court before the third train reached Farringdon Street, to which point only was the railway then available. Lucy walked straight to Staines Court, where she was glad of the opportunity of doing some business of loving kindness at the same time that she sought Poppie. The first house she entered was in a dreadful condition of neglect. There were hardly more balusters in the stairs than served to keep the filthy hand-rail in its place; and doubtless, they would by and by follow the fate of the rest, and vanish as fire-wood. One or two of the stairs, even, were torn to pieces for the same purpose, and the cupboard doors of the room into which Lucy entered had vanished, with half the skirting board and some of the flooring, revealing the joists, and the ceiling, of the room below. All this dilapidation did not matter much in summer weather, but how would it be in the winter--except the police condemned the building before then, and because the wretched people who lived in it could get no better, decreed that so far they should have no shelter at all? Well, when the winter came, they would just go on making larger and larger holes to let in the wind, and fight the cold by burning their protection against it. In this room there was nobody. Something shining in a dingy sunbeam that fell upon one of the holes in the floor, caught Lucy's eye. She stooped, and putting in her hand, drew out a bottle. At the same moment she let it fall back into the hole, and started with a sense of theft. "Don't touch Mrs. Flanaghan's gin bottle, lady. She's a good 'un to swear, as you'd be frightened to hear her. She gives me the creepers sometimes, and I'm used to her. She says it's all she's got in the world, and she's ready to die for the 'ould bottle."' It was Poppie's pretty, dirty face and wild, black eyes that looked round the door-post. Lucy felt considerably relieved. She replaced the bottle carefully, saying as she rose: "I didn't mean to steal it, Poppie. I only saw it shining, and wanted to know what it was. Suppose I push it a little further in, that the sun mayn't be able to see it?"