emoval was the conduct of Miss Winton,
who gave him more than one bad quarter of an hour for his selfishness in
actually accepting the engagement "without a single thought of her." Flo
harped so steadily on this note, that Henry was half-persuaded he was
indeed a shamefully selfish young man; and when he closely examined his
conduct, he wondered whether the satisfaction with which he had
reported his fortune to his father arose from filial affection or from
downright vanity.

The upshot of Miss Winton's exposition of his selfishness and her
tearful protestations against his deserting her was a formal engagement,
where only an "understanding" had existed before. This seemed to still
her anxious heart, but Henry had made the proposition with none of the
fervour with which more than once in fancy he had seen himself begging
for her hand. In truth, his heart misgave him, and he did not mention
the matter in any of his letters home. He rightly judged that such news
might dull the keen edge of pleasure his London appointment would afford
to his own folk at Hampton. He did not even mention it to Mr.
Puddephatt. For the first time in his life he felt himself something of
a dissembler. In this way his removal to London rather aggravated his
state of mental unrest than modified it. His brightest dream had come
true, but--

The first weeks in London, however, were so full of new sensations and
agreeable distractions, that he had scarcely been a fortnight away from
Laysford when it looked like a year. To walk down Fleet Street and the
Strand each day, or to thread the old byways between the Embankment and
Holborn, with the knowledge that no excursion train was to rush him off
northward at the end of fourteen days, was a pleasure which only the
provincial settling in London could enjoy. How he had longed for years
to tread these pavements as a resident, and not merely as a gaping
visitor. His feet gripped them while he walked, as though he thought at
every stride, "Ye are firm beneath me at last, O Streets of London!"

Fleet Street, he knew in his heart, was outwardly as shabby a
thoroughfare as ever served for the main artery of a great city, but he
also knew that if the buildings were mean and the crowd that surged
along its pavements as common to the eye as any in the frowsiest
provincial city, there was more romance behind many of these shabby
windows which bore the names of journals, famous and obscure, than in
stately White