Wyndham stepped after her into the air gratefully. "It is fresh and almost summery. Heaven smiles at us. Shall we stroll down this winding lane? I fancy it must lead to the water-side."
"Hurrah for the winding lane!" she said, and stepped out merrily. At the bottom they entered a street full of black brick warehouses with cranes at work, and huge carts with ponderous horses. "An antediluvian breed!" whispered Lady Betty. They strolled along, peering into dim doorways at vast interiors where a strange universe of life flourished in the glooms amid prodigious collections of barrels and boxes.
"We are almost on Tower Hill," he said suddenly.
"An unexpected fantasy!" she exclaimed, as the Tower of London itself came into view at the end of the narrow street, the grey far-stretching ramparts looming up ghost-like and romantic. "A mediæval mirage amid all this grimy commerce. I wonder if it will vanish presently! But let us try the opposite direction now--are we not vowed to-day to the unfamiliar and unknown?"
They retraced their steps, and, ere long, lighted on an iron gate that led visibly to the water-side.
"The gate is inviting," she said. "I hope it isn't forbidden."
"Ah, here is a notice. I see we shall not be trespassers."
They entered, and, passing through the preliminary alley, found themselves on a broad, open gravelled space beyond which flowed the water. Save for a couple of pigeons wandering about, they had the place all to themselves.
"This is a discovery," declared Lady Betty. "It is as interesting here in its way as the Rialto at Venice."
And indeed they had reason to admire. To the right lay the Bridge of Bridges, whose endlessly rolling traffic was at this distance softened to an artistic suggestion that by no means disturbed their sense of solitude. At the adjoining wharf on the left a Dutch boat was being unladen, actively, yet with a strange sense of stillness and calm. And over all the river and shipping hung a faint grey-blue mist, muffling and enveloping all things out of proportion to its density, and absorbing the sunlight into a haze that already seemed to foretell the chills of the coming twilight of the winter's day. They saw the sun, a large red ball, hanging extraordinarily low in the sky over a long squat warehouse with symmetrical rows of windows. And across the river, under the shadow of the opposite structures, lay strange families of craft and barges, moored in the water, or high on the mud; rusty and silent, some half-broken up, some swinging lazily, touched with the mellow decay of the centuries.