e more
stern in his estimate of the criminality.

At about four o'clock, Kellson had disposed of all the cases, and was
thus free for the rest of the afternoon, so he left the office and
walked up towards his official residence. He had asked the Chief
Constable to see to the fitting up of his room, and he now went to look
over the premises. For a long time he was unable to dismiss the face of
the prisoner Erlank from his memory, it seemed to be almost as familiar
to him as the houses of the street along which he was walking.

The village had hardly changed since he had last seen it. It is one of
those places that do not grow because they happen not to be on any one
of the great highways to the North. One or two old fogeys came up and
greeted Kellson in the street--men he had known well in the old days,
now so changed as to be almost unrecognisable. He passed the little
room which had been used in the old days as a public library and
reading-room. It was now shut up, and almost in ruins. He thought of
how he used to run over from the office and flirt with the librarian, a
very pretty girl, long since married. He passed another house and
caught his breath short. It was that in which she had lived--the girl
he had loved in his youth, and who had loved him. He had left her in a
state of uncertainty as to his intentions, and after keeping up a warm
correspondence for some time, they had gradually become estranged, the
estrangement commencing on his side. Why had he acted like this, he
asked himself bitterly. He had dreaded something or another, he could
not quite define what it was. He remembered how she, who had been as
Steel to others, was like wax in his hands. He remembered----Ah, God
what a lot he remembered.

He arrived at the residency after walking up the hill. The exercise
made him puff. In the old days he used to run up steeper gradients, now
it sometimes distressed him to walk on level ground.

The gate and the fence were new, but the verandah, the door and the
windows, as in the case of the hotel, were the same he had known in the
old days. He opened the door and walked in, his footsteps sounding
hollow in the empty house.

Kellson stood in the passage. He had left the front door wide open so
as to admit the light. The air of the empty house seemed dense with the
essence of the past. He went into every room, pausing for a few seconds
in each, and then entering the next on tip-toe. He stood in the
dining-roo