I hurried after him into the street. A clap of wind struck and staggered us as if it had been water. Beating through the night, its icy fury clutched at us, stinging and buffeting our faces, until it seemed as though we were fighting through an endless thicket of brambles. Struggling and panting onward--silent with the silence of the lost--we made our way by slow degrees to the low ground about Chelsea, and presently came out into a freer air and the black vision of the river sliding before us from night into night. “Duke,” I whispered, awfully--“is this what you fear?” “Follow!” he cried. “I fear nothing! It’s past that!” By lowering factory and grimy wall; by squalid streets peeled of uncleanliness in the teeth of the bitter blast; by low-browed taverns, that gushed red on us a moment and were gone, he sped with crooked paces, and I followed. Then he stopped so suddenly that I almost stumbled against him, and we were standing at the mouth of a shadowy court, and overhead a hiccoughing gas jet made a gibbering terror of his white face. “Where are we?” I said, and he answered: “Where we naturally take up the clew--outside a police station.” CHAPTER XXVI. FROM THE DEPTHS. Into a dull, gusty room, barren of everything but the necessities of its office, we walked and stopped. Distempered walls; a high desk, a railed dock, where creatures were put to the first question like an experimental torture; black windows high in the wall and barred with network of wire, as if to break into fragments the sunshine of hope; a double gas bracket on an arm hanging from the ceiling, grimly suggestive of a gallows; a fireplace whose warmth was ruthlessly boxed in--such was the place we found ourselves in. Its ministers figured in the persons of a half-dozen constables sitting officially yawning on benches against the walls, and looking perplexingly human shorn of their helmets; and in the presence of a high priest, or inspector, and his clerk who sat respectively at the desk and a table placed alongside of it. The latter rose upon our entrance and asked our business. “It’s plain enough,” said Duke. “I have received, by post, an hour ago, a letter from a young woman threatening suicide. I don’t know her address, but the postmark is this district.” The officer motioned us to the higher authority at the desk. “May I see it?” said the latter. My companion produced the letter and handed it over. Throughout his bearing and behavior were completely collected and formal--passionless altogether in their studied unemotionalism. The inspector went through the poor little scrawl attentively from first word to last. No doubt he was a kindly family man in private. Officially these pitiful warrants of heartbreaks were mere items in his day’s business. When he had finished he raised his eyes, but not his head. “Sweetheart?” he said. “No,” answered Duke, “but an old friend.” “Renny?” asked the inspector, pointing a pen at me. “Yes.” “She ran away?”