Clennam remained until everything possible to be done had been skilfully and promptly done--the poor belated wanderer in a strange land movingly besought that favour of him--and lingered by the bed to which he was in due time removed, until he had fallen into a doze.

Even then he wrote a few words for him on his card, with a promise to return to-morrow, and left it to be given to him when he should awake.

All these proceedings occupied so long that it struck eleven o'clock at night as he came out at the Hospital Gate.

He had hired a lodging for the present in Covent Garden, and he took the nearest way to that quarter, by Snow Hill and Holborn.
Left to himself again, after the solicitude and compassion of his last adventure, he was naturally in a thoughtful mood.

As naturally, he could not walk on thinking for ten minutes without recalling Flora.
She necessarily recalled to him his life, with all its misdirection and little happiness.
When he got to his lodging, he sat down before the dying fire, as he had stood at the window of his old room looking out upon the blackened forest of chimneys, and turned his gaze back upon the gloomy vista by which he had come to that stage in his existence.