conductor to direct her to Holy Innocents, and was answered with a jerk
of the thumb.

It stood, in fact, just beyond the bridge, with a high brick wall that
turned off the street at right angles and overhung the towpath of the
canal. Although in architecture wholly dissimilar, the building put her
in mind of the Hospital of the Good Samaritan, and her spirits sank for
a moment. Its facade looked upon the street over a strip of garden
crowded with dingy laurels. It contained a depressingly large number of
windows, and it seemed to her that they were at once bare and dirty.
Also, and simultaneously, it occurred to her that she had no notion what
step to take next, nor how, if she rang the bell, to explain herself.
She temporised therefore; whistled to 'Dolph, and turned aside down the
steps leading to the towpath. She would con the lie of the land before
laying siege--the strength of the castle before summoning the defence.

The castle was patently strong--strong enough to excuse any
disheartenment. Scarcely a window pierced its narrow butt-end, four
stories high, under which the steps wound. It ended just where they met
the towpath, and from its angle sprang a brick wall dead-blank, at least
twelve feet high, which ran for eighty or ninety yards along the
straight line of the path. Across the canal a row of unkempt cottage
gardens sloped to the water, the most of them fenced from the brink of
it with decayed palings, a few with elder bushes and barbed wire to fill
up the gaps, while at least two ended in moraines of old meat tins and
shards of crockery. And between these containing banks wound the canal,
shallow and waveless, with noisome weeds trailing on its surface afloat
amid soot and iridescent patches or pools of tar. In the cottage
gardens not a soul was at work, nor, by their appearance, had a soul
worked in them for years past. The canal, too, was deserted, save for