statistically known and proved, cholera stalks, fever rages, and the
registrar's list is always swelled along the shady side of a London
street.

Elizabeth felt this, though she had not the dimmest idea why. She
stood watching the sunset light fade out of the topmost windows of
the opposite house--ghostly reflection of some sunset over fields and
trees far away; and she listened to the long monotonous cry melting
away round the crescent, and beginning again at the other end of the
street--"Straw-berries--straw-ber-ries!" Also, with an eye to
tomorrow's Sunday dinner, she investigated the cart of the tired
costermonger, who crawled along beside his equally tired donkey,
reiterating at times, in tones hoarse with a day's bawling, his
dreary "Cauli-flower! Cauli-flower!--Fine new pease, sixpence peck!"

But, alas! the pease were neither fine nor new; and the cauliflowers
were regular Saturday night's cauliflowers. Besides, Elizabeth
suddenly doubted whether she had any right, unordered, to buy these
things which, from being common garden necessaries, had become
luxuries. This thought, with some others that it occasioned, her
unwonted state of Idleness and the dullness of every thing about
her--what is so dull as a "quiet" London street on a summer
evening?--actually made Elizabeth stand, motionless and meditative,
for a quarter of an hour. Then she started to hear two cabs drive up
to the door; the "family" had at length arrived.

Ascott was there too. Two new portmanteaus and a splendid hat-box
east either ignominy or glory upon the poor Stowbury luggage;
and--Elizabeth's sharp eye noticed--there was also his trunk which
she had seen lying detained for rent in his Gower Street lodgings.