It was an unusual thing for me to do but I seemed to be suffocating where I was, and nothing else would satisfy me.

As you already surmise, it was the night on which disappeared the sewing girl of which you have so often spoken, but I knew nothing of that, my thoughts were far from my own home and its concerns.

You may judge what a state of mind I was in when I tell you that I even thought at one moment while I paused before the gate leading into -- -- Street that I saw the face of her with whom my thoughts were ever busy, peering upon me through the bars.
"You tell me that I did see a girl there, and that it was the one who had lived as sewing woman in my house; it may be so, but at the time I considered it a vision of my wife, and the remembrance of it, coming as it did after my repeated failures to encounter her in the street, worked a change in my plans.

For regard it as weakness or not, the recollection that the vision I had seen wore the garments of a working-woman rather than a lady, acted upon me like a warning not to search for her any longer among the resorts of the well-dressed, but in the regions of poverty and toil.

I therefore took to wanderings such as I have no heart to describe.