"Soon," she said. "Look here, Gilbert, we'll meet at the door. I'm going to flit down this aisle of murderers on the other side. You go down this side. And if you meet the Libricides—Toftrees et femme I mean, call out!"
She vanished with noiseless tread among the stiff ranks of figures.
Gilbert walked slowly down his own path, looking into each face in turn.
. . . This fat matronly woman, a sort of respectable Mrs. Gamp who probably went regularly to Church, was a celebrated baby farmer. She "made angels" by pressing a gimlet into the soft skulls of her charges—there was the actual gimlet—and save for a certain slyness, she had the face of a quite motherly old thing. Yet she, too, had dropped through the hole in the floor—like all her companions here. . . .
He turned away from all the faces with an impatient shudder.
He ought never to have come here. He was a donkey ever to have let Rita come here. Where was she?—he was to meet her at the end of this horrid avenue. . . .
But the place was large. Rita had disappeared among the waxen ghosts. The door must be this way. . . .
He pressed onwards, walking silently—as one does in a place of the dead—but disregarding with averted eyes, the leers, the smiles, the complacent appeal, of the murderers who had paid their debt to the justice of the courts.
He was beginning to be most unpleasantly affected.
Walking onwards, he suddenly heard Rita's voice. It was higher in key than usual—whom was she speaking to? His steps quickened.