Rachel went on; but she did not turn homewards. She left the broad and airy strait, where Mrs. Moxton lived. She entered a narrow one, long and gloomy. It led her into a large and gas-lit square. She crossed it without looking right or left: a thought led her on like a spell. Through streets and alleys, by lanes and courts--on she went, until at length she stood in the heart of a populous neighbourhood. Cars were dashing along the pavement; night vendors were screaming at their stalls, where tallow lights flared in the night wind. Drunken men were shouting in gin palaces, wretched looking women were coming out of pawnbroker's shops, and precocious London children were pouring into a theatre, where their morals were to be improved, and their understandings were to be enlightened, at the moderate rate of a penny a head. Rachel sighed at all she saw, and divined. "Poor things!" she thought, "if they only knew better." But this compassionate feeling did not exclude a sort of fear. Rachel kept as much as she could in the gloomy part of the streets; she shrank back nervously from every rude group, and thus she at length succeeded in attracting the very thing she most wished to shun--observation. Three or four women, rushing out of a public-house, caught sight of her timid figure. At once, one of them--she was more than half-intoxicated--burst out into a loud shouting laugh, and, seizing Rachel's arm, swung her round on the pavement. "Let me go!" said Rachel "I am in a hurry." She trembled from head to foot, and vainly tried to put on the appearance of a courage she felt not. "Give me something for drink then," insolently said the woman. Rachel's momentary fear was already over; she had said to herself, "and what can happen to me without God's will?" and the thought had nerved her. She looked very quietly at the woman's flushed and bloated face, and as quietly she said: "You have drunk too much already; let me go." "No I won't," hoarsely replied her tormentor, and she used language which, though it could not stain the pure heart of her who heard it, brought the blush of anger and shame to her cheek. "Let me go!" she said, trembling this time with indignation. "Yes--yes, let the young woman go, Molly," observed one of the woman's companions who had hitherto looked on apathetically. She officiously disengaged Rachel's arm, whispering as she did so: "You'd better cut now--I'll hold her. Molly's awful when she's got them fits on."