Our House And London Out of Our Windows

rain. It was close upon ten o'clock when I turned the key in my front door. The flat was in darkness, except for the light that always shines into our front windows at night from the lamps on the Embankment and Charing Cross Bridge. There was no sign of 'Enrietter, and no sound of her until I had pulled my bell three or four times, and shouted for her in the manner I was taught as a child to consider the worst sort of form, not to say vulgar. But it had its effect. A faint voice answered from the ship's cabin upstairs, "Coming, mum." "Light the gas and the lamp," I said when heard her in the hall. The situation called for all the light I could get. From the methodical way she set about lighting the hall gas I knew that, at least, shecould not be reeling. Then she came in and lit the lamp, and I saw her. It was a thousand times worse than reeling, and my breath was taken away with the horror of it. For there she stood, in a flashy pink dressing-gown that was a disgrace in itself, her face ghastly as death, and all across her forehead, low down over one of the blue eyes, a great, wide, red gash. Before I had time to pull myself together 'Enrietter had told her story,? so poor a story it showed how desperate now was her case. She had been quiet all morning ? no one had come ? she had got through the extra work I left with her. About three the milkman rang. A high wind was blowing. The door, when she opened it, banged in her face and cut her head open. And it...