I hope we shall meet again."

"Your wish flatters me much; but, if we do, pray respect the confidence
I have placed in you, and regard my wandering minstrelsy and my dog's
tray as sacred secrets. Should we not so meet, it is but a prudent
reserve on my part if I do not give you my right name and address."

"There you show the cautious common-sense which belongs rarely to lovers
of verse and petticoat interest. What have you done with your guitar?"

"I do not pace the roads with that instrument: it is forwarded to me
from town to town under a borrowed name, together with other raiment
that this, should I have cause to drop my character of wandering
minstrel."

The two men here exchanged a cordial shake of the hand. And as the
minstrel went his way along the river-side, his voice in chanting seemed
to lend to the wavelets a livelier murmur, to the reeds a less plaintive
sigh.

CHAPTER XVIII.

IN his room, solitary and brooding, sat the defeated hero of a hundred
fights. It was now twilight; but the shutters had been partially closed
all day, in order to exclude the sun, which had never before been
unwelcome to Tom Bowles, and they still remained so, making the twilight
doubly twilight, till the harvest moon, rising early, shot its ray
through the crevice, and forced a silvery track amid the shadows of the
floor.

The man's head drooped on his breast; his strong hands rested
listlessly on his knees: his attitude was that of utter despondency and
prostration. But in the expression of his face there were the signs of
some dangerous and restless thought which belied not the gloom but the
stillness of the posture. His brow, which was habitually open and
frank, in its defying aggressive boldness, was now contracted into deep
furrows, and lowered darkly over his downcast, half-closed eyes. His
lips were so tightly compressed that the face lost its roundness, and
the massive bone of the jaw stood out hard and salient. Now and then,
indeed, the lips opened, giving vent to a deep, impatient sigh, but they
reclosed as quickly as they had parted. It was one of those crises in
life which find all the elements that make up a man's former self in
lawless anarchy; in which the Evil One seems to enter and direct the
storm; in which a rude untutored mind, never before harbouring a thought
of crime, sees the crime start up from an abyss, feels it to be an
enemy, yet yields to it as a fate. So that when, at the last, some
wretch