He widened the space about him with those strong desperate arms, and made as if he would have leapt into the hut. Lucius raised his gun, cocked it, and took aim deliberately, without an instant’s hesitation. ‘I told you what would happen if you came here,’ he said, and, with the words, fired. The man fell backwards, dragging the thin parchment window and some part of its fragile framework with him. His death-clutch had fastened on the splintered wood. A wild gust of north-east wind rushed in through the blank space in the log wall, but Lucius Davoren did not feel it. ‘Great God!’ he asked himself, a slow horror creeping through his ice-cold veins, ‘was that a murder?’ END OF THE PROLOGUE. Book the First. CHAPTER I. LOOKING BACKWARDS. Behold, O reader, the eastern end of the great city; a region strange beyond all measure to the dwellers in the west; a low flat marshy district, where the land and the river seem to have become entangled with each other in inextricable confusion, by reason of manifold creeks and creeklets, basins, and pools, which encroach upon the shore, and where the tall spars of mighty merchantmen and giant emigrant-ships rise cheek by jowl with factory chimneys; where the streets are dark and narrow, and the sound of engines hoarsely labouring greets the ear at every turn; where the staple commodity seems to be ship-biscuit; where the shipchandler has his stronghold; where the provision-dealer has his storehouse, in which vast hoards of dried meats and tinned provisions, pickles, and groceries are piled from floor to ceiling and from cellar to garret; a world in which the explorer stumbles unawares upon ropewalks, or finds himself suddenly involved in a cloud of bonnetless factory girls, thick as locusts in Arabia, who jibe and flout at the stranger. Roads there are, broad and airy enough, which lead away from the narrow streets and the stone basins, the quays, the docks, the steam-cranes, and tall ships—not to the country, there seems no such thing as country accessible from this peculiar world—but to distant marshes and broader water; roads fringed with dingy houses, and here and there a factory, and here and there a house of larger size and greater pretension than its neighbours, shut in by high walls perchance, and boasting an ancient garden; a garden where the tall elms were saplings in the days when kings went hunting on the Essex coast yonder; and when this east-end of London had its share of fashion and splendour.