She would like to be angry now.

This end of the corridor was cool and encased in winter shadow but despite this her hand was slippery with perspiration on the handle of her parasol. Her skirts were heavy around her legs. Directly opposite was the door to flat 6. She peered at the door, at the space immediately before the doorway, as though she might discern some essence of her husband, some residual part of him that remained after he had gone, just five minutes earlier. She drew in a breath, pushed back her shoulders and strode towards the door, the parasol gripped in her hand, her reticule in her other hand.

She heard a latch click somewhere behind the door and it began to open.

She darted back, retracing her steps and retreating into the safety of the lift as Miss Trent herself emerged.

Or one presumed it was Miss Trent. Eleanor peered through the grating of the lift. It was a very young woman, surely not more than twenty-one or twenty-two, slight of frame, almost too slender in a way that suggested economies being taken and the occasional straitened circumstance. She was of no more than average height, her hair a dull brown, her complexion unspoiled, to be sure, but pale in a way that made one think she was, or had been as a child, starved of sunlight; it was not the translucently pale and prized complexion that a lady of means and position might cultivate. Certainly her features were very regular, though the nose was perhaps a little too sharp, a little too narrow. A high forehead, an unremarkable chin. Her eyes were pale too, their exact shade elusive in such a fleeting moment. But her hat! It was a sorry little thing, too small, too insignificant, too many years past its prime—if, indeed, it had ever had a prime, which was doubtful. Her jacket too, which was short and narrow at waist and cuff with fussy little cap shoulders, was serviceable but of a feeble shade of green that had been popular with a certain class of female two or three seasons before; and her skirt, very high at the waist, not quite narrow enough at the ankle, was of the same green stuff. Her reticule, though, was of satin and pearl and very smart and, to Eleanor’s eyes, it struck an incongruous note.

Was this her then? And was she a beauty? No, decidedly she was not, but was there something—what? Her face was, perhaps, a little unusual, her bearing not that of a lowly woman at all, for she carried herself with purpose—was it this then? Eleanor did not know. It was so fleeting, her sighting of the woman. An impression, no more.