It is well that man lacks
prescience. Neither Rita nor Sir Lucien could divine that a day was
shortly to come when the hidden presses which throbbed about them that
night should be busy with the story of the murder of one and
disappearance of the other.
Around St. Paul's Churchyard whirled the car, its engine running
strongly and almost noiselessly. The great bell of St. Paul's boomed
out the half-hour.
"Oh!" cried Mollie Gretna, "how that made me jump! What a beautifully
gloomy sound!"
Kilfane murmured some inaudible reply, but neither Pyne nor Rita
spoke.
Cornhill and Leadenhall Street, along which presently their route lay,
offered a prospect of lamp-lighted emptiness, but at Aldgate they
found themselves amid East End throngs which afforded a marked
contrast to those crowding theatreland; and from thence through
Whitechapel and the seemingly endless Commercial Road it was a
different world into which they had penetrated.
Rita hitherto had never seen the East End on a Saturday night, and the
spectacle afforded by these busy marts, lighted by naphtha flames, in
whose smoky glare Jews and Jewesses, Poles, Swedes, Easterns, dagoes,
and halfcastes moved feverishly, was a fascinating one. She thought
how utterly alien they were, the men and women of a world unknown to
that society upon whose borders she dwelled; she wondered how they
lived, where they lived, why they lived.
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