CHAPTER XXVI.
"THE PERSON IN LONDON." The February day was closing in London in a thick, clammy, yellow fog.
No keen frost, no sparkling stars brightened the chill spring twilight; the sky, where it could be seen, was of a uniform leaden tint, the damp mist wet you to the bone, and a long, lamentable blast whistled around the corners and pierced chillingly through the thickest wraps, and passengers strode through the greasy black mud with surly faces and great-coats and the inevitable London umbrella.
At the window of a dull and dirty little lodging a woman sat, in this dark gloaming, gazing out at the passers-by.

The house had a perpetual odor of onions and cabbage and dinner, as it is in the nature of such houses to have, and the room, "first floor front," was in the last stage of lodging-house shabbiness and discomfort.
The woman was quite alone--a still, dark figure sitting motionless by the grimy window.

She might have been carved in stone, so still she sat--so still she had sat for more than two hours.
Her dress was black, of the poorest sort, frayed and worn, and she shivered under a threadbare shawl drawn close around her shoulders.
Yet, in spite of poverty and sickness, and despair and middle age, the woman was beautiful still, with a dark and haggard and wild sort of beauty that would have haunted one to one's dying day.
In her youth, and her first freshness and innocence, she must have been lovely as a dream; but that loveliness was all gone now.
The listless hands lay still, the great, glittering dark eyes stared blankly at the dingy houses opposite, at the straggling pedestrians, at the thickening gloom.

The short February day was almost night now, the street-lamps flared yellow and dull athwart the clammy fog.
"Another day," the woman murmured, "another endless day of sick despair gone.

Alone and dying--the most miserable creature on the wide earth.
Oh, great God, who didst forgive Magdalene, have a little pity on me!" A spasm of fierce anguish crossed her face for an instant, fading away, and leaving the hopeless despair more hopeless than before.
"I am mad, worse than mad, to hope as I do.