lamps, was like a vain death after the idle frivolity of Stephen
Jannan's ball. In an instant, in the shutting of a door, the blackness
had claimed him; the gaiety of warm flesh and laughter vanished. Death
... and he had literally nothing in his hands, nothing in his heart. A
duty, Eunice, remained. The sound of his footfalls on the bricks, thrown
back from blank walls, resembled the embodied, stealthy following of the
injustice he had wrought.




XII


The following morning he made his way past the continuous produce arcade
that held the centre of Market Street to the Camden Ferry. At the river
the fish stall, with its circular green roof and cornucopias, reached
almost to the gloomy ferry-house with its heavy odour of wet wood. The
boat clattered through broken ice, by a trim packet ship, the
_Susquehanna_, and into the narrow canal through Windmill Island. Camden
was a depressing region of low, marshy land, its streets unpaved and
without gas, the gutters full of frozen, stagnant water. He inquired the
way to the Reverend Mr. Needles', passed a brick meeting house, and,
turning into Fourth Street, isolated frame dwellings, coming at last to
a dingy wooden house with broken panes in the upper windows and a
collapsing veranda at the edge of a blackened, skeleton wood.

A tall, gaunt woman in a ravelled worsted shawl answered his summons,
and informed him, interrupted by a prolonged coughing, that Mr. Needles
was away on circuit. "I came for a child staying with you," Jasper Penny