To-day, in the drizzling mist, the place was horribly depressing. Falk plunged down into Bridge Street as into a damp stuffy well. Here some of the houses had once been fine; there were porticoes and deep-set doors and bow-windows, making them poor relations of the handsome benevolent Georgian houses in Orange Street. The street, top-tilting down to the river, was slovenly with dirt and carelessness. Many of the windows were broken, their panes stuffed with paper; washing hung from house to house. The windows that were not broken were hermetically sealed and filled with grimy plants and ferns, and here and there a photograph of an embarrassed sailor or a smiling married couple or an overdressed young woman placed face outward to the street. Bridge Street tumbled with a dirty absent- mindedness into Pennicent Street. This, the main thoroughfare of Seatown, must have been once a handsome cobbled walk by the river-side. The houses, more than in Bridge Street, showed by their pillared doorways and their faded red brick that they had once been gentlemen's residences, with gardens, perhaps, running to the river's edge and a fine view of the meadows and woods beyond. To-day all was shrouded in a mist that was never stationary, that seemed alive in its shifting movement, revealing here a window, there a door, now a chimney-pot, now steps that seemed to lead into air, and the river, now at full tide and lapping the stone wall, seemed its drunken bewildered voice.

"Bally pawns, that's what we are," Falk muttered again. It seemed to be the logical conclusion of the thoughts that had worried him, likes flies, during his walk. Some one lurched against him as he stayed for a moment t