‘You advise me to do this?’ ‘I do.’ He bent down and whispered in Forster’s ear--Forster started--the two men looked at each other. After some hesitation Forster spoke. ‘He shall have the money!’ he said. ‘And you will make those conditions?’ ‘Certainly.’ Forster sat down at once, and wrote a note to Gavrolles. In it he said that he (Gavrolles) should be supplied with a certain sum, if he would pledge himself to return at once to France. CHAPTER XL.--‘RESURGAM.’ On a sombre autumn afternoon, the solitary figure of a woman stood looking backward and westward, towards the round red ball of the sun, which was sinking slowly into the very heart, as it were, of the great far-away cloud which she knew was London. All around her, on every side, stretched desolate marshes, silent save for the hoarse cry of a heron dapping slowly towards his crimson fishing pools, or for the faint forlorn whistle of a distant curlew. No other human figure was in sight, not even a human habitation; but over the trees of a lonely plantation, skirting the marshes to the southward, the spire of Grayfleet Church glittered back the rays of the setting sun. The woman, though pale and haggard, was young and beautiful; and as she watched the far-off sunset its dim ray touched her cheeks with a faint tinge of red. She stood like one in a dream, shading her eyes and gazing on the dusky pageant--cloud, smoke, and mist irradiated into gloomy splendour, and assuming, as the fancy willed, strange forms of crumbling buildings, fiery streets, columns, roofs, arches, spires, and turrets, all duskily aflame. It did not seem real; no more real than the city she had left behind her, than the grave from which she had risen into some dimmer and sadder life. Yet her eyes dimmed with tears as she thought of one solitary figure waiting lonely and despairing yonder, listening for a foot that came not, praying for a love cast away and lost. Nothing seemed real; not the cloudy pageant, or the darkening sun, or the desolate earth; not the life that she had lived, or the life that she had voluntarily left behind; not the long years of a confused and broken experience, chiefly of helplessness and sorrow; nothing but the clinging, contaminating sense of some great sin and shame. As a creature half choked and drowned, just dragged living out of some watery ooze, with all the foul moisture and the slimy filth clinging to her garments, this woman seemed and felt. The consciousness of a complete moral contamination, from which she had barely emerged, still remained with her, and not all the perfumes of Arabia could have cleansed it away.