Fortunately it was a bright winter noon, and everything favoured the flitting, which was accomplished in a very short time. But we who have in these days any experience of removals—and happy those who have not that experience—know how patience and temper are apt to fail, as the hopeless chaos of the new house is only a degree less hopeless than that of the old house we are leaving. We have vans, and packers, and helpers at command, unknown in the days of Mr. and Miss Herschel; for at the close of the last century few, indeed, were the removals from house to house. As a rule, people gathered round them their "household gods," and handed them down to their children in the house where they had been born and brought up. Removal from one part of England to another was not to be thought of at that time, when roads were bad and conveyances rare, and a distance of twenty miles more difficult to accomplish than that of two or three hundred in our own time. Mr. Herschel's reason for taking the house in King Street was that the garden behind it afforded room for the great experiment then always looming before him—the casting of the great mirror for the thirty-foot reflector.
Griselda passed on without even getting a smile of recognition from Miss Herschel, so thoroughly engrossed was she with the business in hand; and a sense of loneliness came over her, as she said to herself:
"How could I expect Miss Herschel to recognise me, especially in this thick pelisse and hat? I must not expect my concerns to be of importance to her or to anyone."
And as this thought passed through her mind, she became conscious that to someone, at least, her concerns were of importance; for Leslie Travers had seen her from the window of his mother's house, and had thrown his cloak over his shoulders without delay, and, with his hat looped up at one side in his hand, advanced, saying:
"This is a happy chance! I am anxious to see you; and, if you will, I would fain tell you more of a visit I paid to the poor people in Crown Alley. It is a pitiable case!"
"And I want to see them," Griselda said, "and to help the child with the angelic face. I have in my bag the trinkets I spoke of. Will you take me at once to a shop in the Abbey Churchyard, and inquire for me the price they will fetch? I want also," she said hurriedly, "to consult you, or rather your mother, as to what I should do. I cannot—I cannot live any longer with Lady Betty, unless she promises to protect me from the man I detest!"
Leslie Travers's face kindled with delight.
"Come at once to my mother, at No. 14 in this street. She will be proud to receive you," he said eagerly.
"I must not act hastily," Griselda said. "I left Lady Betty in anger this morning; but I have reason to be angry."
"You have indeed, if you are forced into the company of a man like Sir Maxwell Danby. From him I would fain protect you. But," he said, checking himself, "I am at your service now about the trinkets, or shall we pay a visit to the poor folks first? It is, I warn you, a sad spectacle—can you bear it? I have questioned Mr. Palmer of the theatre, and he says the man (Lamartine) is a man of genius, but a reprobate. He has for some time made his living on the stage, and when not in drink is a wonderful actor. But he is subject to desperate fits of drunkenness, and on his arrival here from Bristol he broke out in one, and falling down the stairs at the theatre after the second rehearsal, injured himself so terribly that he cannot live."