The sense of this serious peril⁠—a peril which every day and every hour might bring nearer and nearer to us⁠—was the one influence that guided me in fixing the place of our retreat. I chose it in the far east of London, where there were fewest idle people to lounge and look about them in the streets. I chose it in a poor and a populous neighbourhood⁠—because the harder the struggle for existence among the men and women about us, the less the risk of their having the time or taking the pains to notice chance strangers who came among them. These were the great advantages I looked to, but our locality was a gain to us also in another and a hardly less important respect. We could live cheaply by the daily work of my hands, and could save every farthing we possessed to forward the purpose, the righteous purpose, of redressing an infamous wrong⁠—which, from first to last, I now kept steadily in view.

In a week’s time Marian Halcombe and I had settled how the course of our new lives should be directed.