"Oh, my dear, my dear," cried the widow, "I'm just thankful that I thought of turning back and seeing after you. Anyway, though I'm poor, I'm respectable and will do my best for you. I'm thankful that you didn't go with that dreadful woman. You don't know the wickedness of cities. Keep close to me, my dear. We'll take this bus and we'll be home in a quarter of an hour. You won't mind it being poor will you? It's a deal better to be poor than to be wicked." Meg, pale with her experience, sat thankfully in the motor bus by the widow, and wondered if she would ever get out of London again. Already she hated it. Why did people stare in the way they did? It frightened her so that she sat as close to her friend as possible and wondered if she would ever venture into the streets alone. A quarter of an hour afterwards she was standing in the little room belonging to the widow, looking out on a dingy street crowded with the poorest of the poor. They were over a small greengrocer shop, and in the street below there were stalls piled with vegetables, fruit, fish and other eatables. The smell of these provisions ascended through the open window and made Meg turn sick, but she was thankful to be safe, and full of gratitude to the good woman who had given up her own little bedroom for her. "I can put a shake-down on the floor easily in the next room," she said cheerfully, when Meg expostulated, "and Tommy won't know the difference. I'm more accustomed to roughing, I take it, than you are. To-morrow perhaps we may find something more comfortable for you. But anyway, my dear, you won't come to no harm here." Meg stood looking down at the hurrying crowd. There were dirty lace curtains hanging before the window and a sickly geranium in a little red pot on the sill. Everything in the room looked grey with dirt to Meg's eyes. She glanced around comparing it with the room with the white paper covered with roses at Friars Court, and thought of the smell of lavender that she had delighted in when she lay in bed her first night there. Then her thoughts flew to the still garden in which she had stood only this morning, with her feet on the dewy grass and the birds singing to one another. What a contrast? As Meg stood looking down into the narrow grey street she could see nothing but sadness and dreariness in the faces of the passers-by. The cries of the hawkers ascended into her ears and the rumble of omnibuses and cabs. Oh why had she come to London? Why had she not been content to roam the sweet lanes once more, to sleep out under the stars, even though that meant weariness and sometimes hunger. Anything was better than this. To find herself in a barn or under a hedge would seem paradise compared to this close breathless atmosphere, this hot summer air laden with the scent of stale vegetables, fish, and refuse of all kinds.