"You have done a brave thing indeed, Adrienne!" he said slowly. "You have saved your lover. You have betrayed the man who would have given his life to serve you. Listen to me! As I loved you before so do I hate you now! As my love for you in the past has governed my life, and brought me always to your side, so in the days to come shall my undying hate for you and for that man shape my actions and mold my life, and bring me over sea and land to the farthest corners of the earth to wreak my vengeance upon you. Be it ten, or twenty, or thirty years, they keep me rotting in their prisons, the time will come when I shall be free again; and then, beware! Search your memory for the legends of our race! Was ever a hate forgotten, or an oath broken? Hear me swear," he cried, raising his clasped hands above his head with a sudden passionate gesture, "by the sun, and the sky, and the sea, and the earth, I swear that, as they continue unchanged and unchanging, so shall my hate for you remain! Ah! you can take your lover's hand, traitress, and think to find protection there. But in your heart I read your fear. The day shall come when you shall kneel at my feet for mercy, and there shall be no mercy. Gentlemen, my sword. I am at your service."
A man in a fur-lined overcoat--thin, shrunken, and worn--stood on the pavement in a little street in Camberwell, looking about him in evident disgust. Before him stretched a long row of six-roomed houses, smoke-begrimed, hideously similar, hideously commonplace. The street was empty save for the four-wheeled cab from which he had just alighted, and which was now vanishing in a slight fog, a milkman and a greengrocer's boy in amicable converse, and a few dirty children playing in the gutter. Nothing could be more depressing, or more calculated to unfavorably impress a stranger from a southern land visiting the great city for the first time. It was a picture of suburban desolation, the home of poverty-stricken philistinism, uncaring and uncared for. In Swinburne's words, though with a different meaning, one saw there, without the necessity of further travel, "a land that was lonelier than ruin."
The little old man who had alighted from the cab, stood for a moment or two looking helplessly around, half surprised at what he saw, half disgusted. Such monotonous and undeviating ugliness was a thing which he had never dreamed of--certainly he had never encountered anything like it. Was it possible that he had made a mistake in the address? He drew a scrap of paper from his pocket and consulted it again. The address was written there plainly enough--85, Eden Street, Camberwell. He was certainly in Eden Street, Camberwell, and the figures on the gate-post opposite him, worn and black with dirt, were unmistakably an eight and a five. With a little shudder he pushed open the gate, and walked through the narrow strip of untidy garden to the front door. The bell he found broken and useless, so he knocked softly at first, and then louder against the worn panels.