The narrow lane, running back at right angles to the great thoroughfare, was filled with blurred yellowish light and covered in with gloom, low-hanging and impenetrable. The high, blank buildings on either side of it looked like the perpendicular walls of a tunnel, the black roof they apparently supported being as solid and substantial as themselves. The effect thereby produced was suspect and prison-like, as of a space walled in and closed from open air and day. Outside the stage entrance of the Twentieth Century Theatre a small crowd had collected and formed up in two parallel lines across the pavement to the curb, against which a smart single brougham and some half a dozen four-wheelers and hansoms were drawn up. The crowd, which gathered and broke only to gather again, was composed for the main part of persons of the better artisan class, respectable, soberly habited, evidently awaiting the advent of relations employed within the theatre. There was also a sprinkling of showy young women, attended by undersized youths flashily dressed. On the fringes of it night-birds, male and female, of evil aspect, loitered, watchful of possible prey; while two or three gentlemen, correct, highly-civilised, stood smoking, each with the air of studied indifference which defies attempted recognition on the part of friend or foe. And among these last Dominic Iglesias must be counted; though, in his case, indifference was not assumed but real. His surroundings were novel, it is true, and produced on him clear impressions both pictorial and moral; but those impressions were of his surroundings in and for themselves, rather than in any doubtfulness of their relation to himself. For his mind was occupied with problems painful in character and difficult of solution; and to the said problems, heightening the emotional strain of them, his surroundings--the sense of feverish life, of all-encompassing restless humanity; the figures anxious, degraded, of questionable purpose or merely frivolous, which started into momentary distinctness; the scraps of conversation, caught in passing, instinct with suggestion, squalid or passionate; along with the ceaseless tramp of footsteps, and tumult of the great thoroughfare just now packed with the turn-out of neighbouring places of entertainment--supplied a background penetratingly appropriate.