At length, but not till after two or three inquiries on Mr. Wingate's part, Plumtree Street was found, number sixteen. It was a narrow street of three-storey tenements, all of them looking unspeakably squalid and uncared for, with broken windows stuffed with rags and paper, and in many cases with doors which hardly hung together on their hinges. Mr. Wingate now gave Hermia the parcel, which he had hitherto taken charge of, and while he waited on guard, as it were, on the corner of the street, Hermia made her way to number sixteen, and not without a little fluttering of the nerves, knocked at the door. Again and again she knocked, first with her knuckles and then with the handle of her umbrella--the knocker itself, if there had ever been one, having apparently been wrenched away long ago--but to no purpose, although she could hear a woman inside objurgating someone at the top of her voice. A swarm of children watched her every movement, and presently, as if by some preconcerted signal, windows were thrown up, and the doorways near at hand began to fill with the shapes of slatternly women, and frowsy, disreputable-looking men. Hermia began to feel far from comfortable, and she was just considering whether she had not better go back to Mr. Wingate, when the door was suddenly opened from within, and she found herself face to face with Richard Varrel. She knew him again at a glance, despite the woeful change which a few short years had wrought in him. In days gone by, when he was a clerk, and she a girl of ten or twelve, she used often to meet him on her way to school, when he had always a smiling "Good-morning" for her. In those days he was a dandified, good-looking young man, with a facile smile, and the easy manner of one who was on excellent terms with himself and the world. Hermia had not seen him after his "misfortune," as he termed it, till the evening of the trial when he spoke to John Brancker through the cab window, and even then she had been shocked to see the change in him; but now, when she beheld him again, the change was still more marked. His hands trembled like aspen leaves, his eyes were bleared and bloodshot, his face sallow and fallen away to little more than skin and bone. He stood staring at Hermia, holding the open door in his hand, with a sort of half-gleam of recognition in his furtively suspicious eyes. "Mr. Varrel," she said, "I see that you fail to remember me. My name is Hermia Rivers, and I am the niece of Mr. Brancker, of Ashdown." The moment she began to speak his face lighted up with what seemed like the ghost of his old pleasant smile. "What a stupid I must be to have forgotten you even for a moment!" he exclaimed. "Why of course I remember you, Miss Hermia--remember you from the time you were no higher than a table. Do you know what I used to think in those days? But how should you? I used to think that when you grew up I should like to marry you. Ah, I did, and I was in earnest about it, too!"