enforced with assurances that there would be potent eyes and ears in
her employment cognizant of all she did; and these directions Florence
promised faithfully and earnestly to observe.

At length, Mrs Brown, issuing forth, conducted her changed and
ragged little friend through a labyrinth of narrow streets and lanes
and alleys, which emerged, after a long time, upon a stable yard, with
a gateway at the end, whence the roar of a great thoroughfare made
itself audible. Pointing out this gateway, and informing Florence that
when the clocks struck three she was to go to the left, Mrs Brown,
after making a parting grasp at her hair which seemed involuntary and
quite beyond her own control, told her she knew what to do, and bade
her go and do it: remembering that she was watched.

With a lighter heart, but still sore afraid, Florence felt herself
released, and tripped off to the corner. When she reached it, she
looked back and saw the head of Good Mrs Brown peeping out of the low
wooden passage, where she had issued her parting injunctions; likewise
the fist of Good Mrs Brown shaking towards her. But though she often
looked back afterwards - every minute, at least, in her nervous
recollection of the old woman - she could not see her again.

Florence remained there, looking at the bustle in the street, and
more and more bewildered by it; and in the meanwhile the clocks
appeared to have made up their minds never to strike three any more.
At last the steeples rang out three o'clock; there was one close by,
so she couldn't be mistaken; and - after often looking over her
shoulder, and often going a little way, and as often coming back
again, lest the all-powerful spies of Mrs Brown should take offence -
she hurried off, as fast as she could in her slipshod shoes, holding