She would spend long mornings or evenings in the fields and lanes by the Lea, walking or sitting, silent and alone. She never went to the disorganised, lifeless remnant of Datcherd’s settlement; only she would travel by the tram up Shoreditch and Mare Street to the north east, and walk along the narrow path by the Lea-side wharf cottages, little and old and jumbled, and so over the river on to Leyton Marsh, where sheep crop the grass. Here she and Datcherd had often walked, after an evening at the Club, and here she now wandered alone. These regions have a queer, perhaps morbid, peace; they brood, as it were, on the fringe of the huge world of London; they divide it, too, from that other stranger, sadder world beyond the Lea, Walthamstow and its endless drab slums. Here, in the November twilight on Leyton Marsh, Eddy found her once. He himself was bicycling back from Walthamstow, where he had been to see one of his Club friends (he had made many) who lived there. Eileen was leaning on a stile at the end of one of the footpaths that thread this strange borderland. They met face to face; and she looked at him as if she did not see him, as if she was expecting someone not him. He got off his bicycle, and said “Eileen.” She looked at him dully, and said, “I’m waiting for Hugh.” He gently took her hand. “You’re cold. Come home with me.” Her dazed eyes upon his face slowly took perception and meaning, and with them pain rushed in. She shuddered horribly, and caught away her hand. “Oh ... I was waiting ... but it’s no use ... I suppose I’m going mad....” “No. You’re only tired and unstrung. Come home now, won’t you. Indeed you mustn’t stay.” The mists were white and chilly about them; it was a strange phantom world, set between the million-eyed monster to the west, and the smaller, sprawling, infinitely sad monster to the east. She flung out her arms to the red-eyed city, and moaned, “Hugh, Hugh, Hugh,” till she choked and cried. Eddy bit his own lips to steady them. “Eileen--dear Eileen--come home. He’d want you to.” She returned, through sobs that rent her. “He wants nothing any more. He always wanted things, and never got them; and now he’s dead, the way he can’t even want. But I want him; I want him; I want him--oh, Hugh!” So seldom she cried, so strung up and tense had she long been, even to the verge of mental delusion, that now that a breaking-point had come, she broke utterly, and cried and cried, and could not stop. He stood by her, saying nothing, waiting till he could be of use. At last from very weariness she quieted, and stood very still, her head bowed on her arms that were flung across the stile. He said then, “Dear, you will come now, won’t you,” and apathetically she lifted her head, and her dim, wet, distorted face was strange in the mist-swathed moonlight.