f a quiet
selfishness that had rusted into his inactive mind; of a peculiar sort
of vanity, the most uneasy attribute about him; of a disposition to
craft which had seldom produced more positive effects than the keeping
of petty secrets hardly worth revealing; and, lastly, of what she
called a little strangeness sometimes in the good man. This latter
quality is indefinable, and perhaps non-existent.

Let us now imagine Wakefield bidding adieu to his wife. It is the dusk
of an October evening. His equipment is a drab greatcoat, a hat
covered with an oil-cloth, top-boots, an umbrella in one hand and a
small portmanteau in the other. He has informed Mrs. Wakefield that he
is to take the night-coach into the country. She would fain inquire
the length of his journey, its object and the probable time of his
return, but, indulgent to his harmless love of mystery, interrogates
him only by a look. He tells her not to expect him positively by the
return-coach nor to be alarmed should he tarry three or four days,
but, at all events, to look for him at supper on Friday evening.
Wakefield, himself, be it considered, has no suspicion of what is
before him. He holds out his hand; she gives her own and meets his
parting kiss in the matter-of-course way of a ten years' matrimony,
and forth goes the middle-aged Mr. Wakefield, almost resolved to
perplex his good lady by a whole week's absence. After the door has
closed behind him, she perceives it thrust partly open and a vision of
her husband's face through the aperture, smiling on her and gone in a
moment. For the time this little incident is dismissed without a
thought, but long afterward, when she has been more years a widow than
a wife, that smile recurs and flickers across all her reminiscences of
Wakefield's visage. In her many musings she surrounds the original
smile with a multitude of fantasies which make it strange and awful;
as, for instance, if she imagines him in a coffin, that parting look
is frozen on his pale features; or if she dreams of him in heaven,
still his blessed spirit wears a quiet and crafty smile. Yet for its
sake, when all others have given him up for dead, she sometimes doubts
whether she is a widow.

But our business is with the husband. We must hurry after him along
the street ere he lose his individuality and melt into the great mass
of London life. It would be vain searching for him there. Let us
follow close at his heels, therefore, until, after sever