On her right lay a ditch neither wet nor dry; on her left the voiceless waters of the canal, and beyond the canal a line of mute, uninhabited, inscrutable wharves which looked like dead parts of a living city which had drifted away, leaving this rack behind.
She sped on, unheeding her surroundings. She did not look to left or right. She kept the edge of the canal, as though the water were the best friend she had there. Now and then with her white ungloved hand she drew her cloak closer round her, rather as though to preserve her own resolution within it, to prevent her purpose from escaping, than to protect her from observation from without.
She came within the shadow of the mighty gas-house, which, too, was silent, save now and then a startling and alarming clamour of metal, as though the summons of Titan to witness some overwhelming disaster. Against the blue sky and pallid stars of early summer the huge chimneys, and cranes, and pillars, and tanks, and viaducts, and scaffolding, and shoots, and the enormous and towering masses of the gasometers, stood up in a piece like some prodigious engine of one motive, some monstrous machine used in the building of mountains or hollowing out of seas. Now and then, through apertures low down in this prodigious engine, small living things, no bigger than insects in comparison with the mass, came and stood clearly visible, pricked out in the darkness against the glow within. These were men flying for a moment from the fiery heat of the huge instrument to cool their bodies and their lungs in the open air.
The woman took no more note of all this wonderful work of man than to draw her cloak to her on that side, lest it might distract her from her purpose.
At length, as she kept on her way undismayed, she approached a black mass of shadow, stretching across the canal and tow-path, as though to bar her further progress.
As she drew nearer, an arc of light appeared in the centre of this dark barrier, and beyond, or rather in the middle of the arc a speck of brighter light still.
The dark barrier was Welford Bridge; the larger and duller light in the middle of it was the eye of the bridge; and the central ray, like the light on the pupil of an eye, was the lamp in the bedroom of Boland's Ait.
The woman paused when she saw this latter light, and, leaving the margin of the canal, crossed the tow-path to a low warehouse and leaned against the wall in the shadow to rest.
From the point at which she now stood resting against the wall she could see the light in the open window of the cottage.
Presently the spark formed by the lamp waved. The lamp had been removed from the window-sill. The sash of the window was allowed to remain up. There was a sudden flicker of light, and then all in the cottage was dark. The lamp had been extinguished.