ailway station nearest to
Endelstow, and the place from which Stephen Smith had journeyed over the
downs on the, to him, memorable winter evening at the beginning of
the same year. The carrier's van was so timed as to meet a starting
up-train, which Stephen entered. Two or three hours' railway travel
through vertical cuttings in metamorphic rock, through oak copses rich
and green, stretching over slopes and down delightful valleys, glens,
and ravines, sparkling with water like many-rilled Ida, and he plunged
amid the hundred and fifty thousand people composing the town of
Plymouth.

There being some time upon his hands he left his luggage at the
cloak-room, and went on foot along Bedford Street to the nearest church.
Here Stephen wandered among the multifarious tombstones and looked in at
the chancel window, dreaming of something that was likely to happen by
the altar there in the course of the coming month. He turned away and
ascended the Hoe, viewed the magnificent stretch of sea and massive
promontories of land, but without particularly discerning one feature of
the varied perspective. He still saw that inner prospect--the event
he hoped for in yonder church. The wide Sound, the Breakwater, the
light-house on far-off Eddystone, the dark steam vessels, brigs,
barques, and schooners, either floating stilly, or gliding with tiniest
motion, were as the dream, then; the dreamed-of event was as the
reality.

Soon Stephen went down from the Hoe, and returned to the railway
station. He took his ticket, and entered the London train.

That day was an irksome time at Endelstow vicarage. Neither father nor
daughter alluded to the departure of Stephen. Mr. Swancourt's manner
towards her partook of the compunctious kindness that arises from a
misgiving as to the justice of some previous act.

Either from lack of the capacity to grasp the whole coup d'oeil, or from
a natural endowment for certain kinds of stoicism, women are cooler than
men in critical situations of the passive form. Probably, in Elfride's
case at least, it was blindness to the greater contingencies of the
future she was preparing for herself, which enabled her to ask her
father in a quiet voice if he could give her a holiday soon, to ride to
St. Launce's and go on to Plymouth.

Now, she had only once before gone alone to Plymouth, and that was in
consequence of some unavoidable difficulty. Being a country girl, and a
good, not to say a wild, horsewoman, it