'No more,' returned Mr Meagles. 'I have been hunting about all day. She

must have gone very early and very silently. I have found no trace of

her down about us.' 'Stay! You want,' said Clennam, after a moment's reflection, 'to see

her? I assume that?' 'Yes, assuredly; I want to give her another chance; Mother and Pet

want to give her another chance; come! You yourself,' said Mr Meagles,

persuasively, as if the provocation to be angry were not his own at all,

'want to give the poor passionate girl another chance, I know, Clennam.'

'It would be strange and hard indeed if I did not,' said Clennam, 'when

you are all so forgiving. What I was going to ask you was, have you

thought of that Miss Wade?'

'I have. I did not think of her until I had pervaded the whole of our

neighbourhood, and I don't know that I should have done so then but

for finding Mother and Pet, when I went home, full of the idea that

Tattycoram must have gone to her. Then, of course, I recalled what she

said that day at dinner when you were first with US.'

'Have you any idea where Miss Wade is to be found?'

'To tell you the truth,' returned Mr Meagles, 'it's because I have an

addled jumble of a notion on that subject that you found me waiting

here. There is one of those odd impressions in my house, which do

mysteriously get into houses sometimes, which nobody seems to have

picked up in a distinct form from anybody, and yet which everybody seems

to have got hold of loosely from somebody and let go again, that she

lives, or was living, thereabouts.' Mr Meagles handed him a slip of

paper, on which was written the name of one of the dull by-streets in

the Grosvenor region, near Park Lane.

'Here is no number,' said Arthur looking over it.

'No number, my dear Clennam?' returned his friend. 'No anything! The

very name of the street may have been floating in the air; for, as I

tell you, none of my people can say where they got it from. However,

it's worth an inquiry; and as I would rather make it in company than

alone, and as you too were a fellow-traveller of that immovable woman's,

I thought perhaps--' Clennam finished the sentence for him by taking up

his hat again, and saying he was ready.

It was now summer-time; a grey, hot, dusty evening. They rode to the top

of Oxford Street, and there alighting, dived in among the great streets

of melancholy stateliness, and the little streets that try to be as

stately and succeed in being more melancholy, of which there is a

labyrinth near Park Lane. Wildernesses of corner houses, with barbarous

old porticoes and appurtenances; horrors that came into existence under

some wrong-headed person in some wrong-headed time, still demanding

the blind admiration of all ensuing generations and determined to do

so until they tumbled down; frowned upon the twilight. Parasite little

tenements, with the cramp in their whole frame, from the dwarf hall-door

on the giant model of His Grace's in the Square to the squeezed window

of the boudoir commanding the dunghills in the Mews, made the evening

doleful.




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