The meeting gave the girl a great shock. Goodhare’s presence poisoned all the pleasure she had felt in Rees’s protestations of affection. With a sudden change to extreme dignity and reticence, she turned to Rees, and told him that she would go and find his mother; she was afraid something had happened to detain her. Then, before he could remember that she did not know where Mrs. Pennant was, Deborah shook hands with him, bowed coldly to Goodhare, and left the house. Once outside in the street she did not know where to go. It was not much past midday, but already the fog was hanging in a thick brown veil over the houses; in a few hours even old Londoners would be unable to find their way from place to place. She turned to the left, and walking a few paces slowly up the street, found herself at the corner of a paved passage, which ran, between two rows of dismal, deserted houses, into Charing Cross-road. The entrance to this passage was flanked by high boardings, which were covered with flaming advertisement posters, among which there flaunted conspicuously the colossal portrait of a lady with a marvellous abundance of curly hair, whose eyes had been carefully picked out by the ubiquitous boy. Deborah gazed up at the houses with fascinated interest. They were old, almost ruinous. The windows, the glass of which had in nearly all cases disappeared, were covered by nailed-up boards. Most of these buildings had been small shops which had gone gradually down in the world, as was proved by the fact that in some cases two had been made out of what was originally one. The doors were nailed up as well as the windows, and pasted over the whole of the ground-floor walls were the dingy remains of more posters, which the damp had reduced to fluttering rags. There was a look about these hole-and-corner beetle-browed little shops which would have suggested to a more sophisticated observer the unsavory literature of Holywell-street. To Deborah the place was eloquent only of black poverty and wretchedness, such as, in her pleasant country life, she had scarcely dreamed of. She glanced down the gratings into the disused cellars, full of dust and rubbish, then up at the great beam which had been put across from side to side at one end of the passage to keep the tottering buildings from falling in, while they awaited their impending demolition. As she raised her head and watched with a kind of horror the great clouds of mist and smoke that seemed to roll down towards the earth from the brown sky, she heard footsteps on the flags behind her, and turned with a start to see Amos Goodhare. His mouth expanded with an ugly smile as his eyes met hers. The girl thought that he looked like the incarnate spirit of evil, and that his figure harmonised with the hideous surroundings.