Explore "Lady Audley's Secret" by Mary Elizabeth Braddon on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Robert Audley did not return to Southampton, but took a ticket for the first up-train that left Wareham, and reached Waterloo Bridge an hour or two after dark. The snow, which had been hard and crisp in Dorsetshire, was a black and greasy slush in the Waterloo Road, thawed by the flaring lamps of the gin-palaces and the glaring gas in the butchers' shops.
Robert Audley shrugged his shoulders as he looked at the dingy streets through which the Hansom carried him, the cabman choosing -- with that delicious instinct which seems innate in the drivers of hackney vehicles -- all those dark and hideous thoroughfares utterly unknown to the ordinary pedestrian.