'It may be for a little Christ.'" They would not let less loving hands come near her.
* * * * * Her father had completed his business, and both were glad to leave London.

She had a sense of something sinister, foreboding, casting its shadow on the sordid, unclean streets, the neglected buildings falling into disrepair.

A lurking savagery, a half-veiled enmity seemed to be stealing among the people.

The town's mad lust for pleasure: its fierce, unjoyous laughter: its desire ever to be in crowds as if afraid of itself: its orgies of eating and drinking: its animal-like indifference to the misery and death that lay but a little way beyond its own horizon! She dared not remember history.

Perhaps it would pass.
The long, slow journey tried her father's strength, and assuming an authority to which he yielded obedience tempered by grumbling, Joan sent him to bed, and would not let him come down till Christmas Day.