"Indeed. Tomorrow evening I should expect a crowd gathering along the route," said Johann. "I did not expect one this evening—but—" He trailed off as they rounded the final deflection. A stone’s throw ahead, Monmouth Street joined together with two others, like tributaries of a river, to form a short but very wide thoroughfare that exhausted directly into a place called Broad St. Giles’s. Their view into that district was blocked by a wide but shallow building erected square across their path, like a sandbar at the mouth of a river. It was brick below and timber above, with a pocked tile roof, and was so generally mean in its appearance that from this distance it might have been taken for a stable. But it had a few too many chimneys for that, all of them tottering into the weather like elderly pallbearers leaning into a gale. On the side facing Johann and Caroline it had a little front court running its whole width, supervised by a veranda. Several white-haired, gray-faced chaps were strewn upon some benches there. This was the St. Giles’s alms-house, where parishioners who had outlived their means, their families, or their welcomes could be parked until they were ready for permanent berths in the nearby church-yard. For whatever reason, it had been built in the middle of the intersection so that Monmouth Street traffic must divert around it.