Alf did as he was bid, wondering all the while what was up, but he said nothing, wisely keeping his thoughts to himself.
When ready his mistress led him to the door. There was a cab waiting outside, but Alf remarked that the horse was a fine animal and well groomed, and that the driver wore no badge upon his coat.
“Now, then, jump in,” cried his mistress; he obeyed, and was followed by Miss Stanbridge.
The driver of the vehicle, without waiting for the usual instructions as to where he was to drive to, set off at a brisk pace towards Trafalgar-square.
The cab rattled along down the Strand, which was full of noise and light, and through the ponderous arch of Temple Bar into the City, grave, dark, and silent as it is by night alone.
In a short time the vehicle passed along Leadenhall-street, Aldgate, lighted only by the street lamps, and here and there by a faint gleam from a window of some cigar shop or tavern; then they entered a street so broad, so bustling, that one would have fancied oneself in one of the great thoroughfares of the West-end, were it not for the small size of the houses and the squalid appearance of the inhabitants.
They had passed the boundary between wealth and poverty, between vice and crime.
They were now in a new world, among a race of men who were governed by different customs, by different fashions, by different codes of morality from those of civilised London.
They had crossed the frontier of Aldgate pump, and had reached the land of costermongers and thieves.
They were in Whitechapel.