3. AUGUST THE TWENTY-FIFTHFive days after the above-mentioned dialogue took place they
went to London, and, with scarcely a minute's pause, to the
solicitors' offices in Lincoln's Inn Fields.
They alighted opposite one of the characteristic entrances about
the place—a gate which was never, and could never be, closed,
flanked by lamp-standards carrying no lamp. Rust was the only
active agent to be seen there at this time of the day and year. The
palings along the front were rusted away at their base to the
thinness of wires, and the successive coats of paint, with which
they were overlaid in bygone days, had been completely undermined
by the same insidious canker, which lifted off the paint in flakes,
leaving the raw surface of the iron on palings, standards, and gate
hinges, of
