den
walls. But it led him surely enough to Westgate, and the spot
occupied in Norman times (as he recalled) by five bordels or
shanties, where any belated traveller ('such as I to-night,' thought
the colonel) arriving after the gates were shut, might find
hospitality for the love of God. The suburb here lay deserted.
He halted, and listened to a footfall that died away into the
darkness on his right. He felt at home again--here, wrapped around
by the ghostly centuries as by the folds of a mantle, and warm within
the folds.

Strange to say, the chill came on him as he passed under the arch of
Westgate, and into view of the busy High Street, the lit shops, the
passers-by jostling upon the pavements, the running newsboys, the
hawkers with their barrows, the soldiers strolling five abreast down
the middle of the roadway. Here was the whole city coming and going.
Here, precisely as he had left it thirty-five years ago, it sprang
back into life again, like an illuminated clockwork. No; he was
wrong, of course. It had been working all the while, and without
intermission, absorbed in its own business--buying and selling,
marrying and giving in marriage. He had dropped out, that was all.

The Christmas decorations, the jollity in the voices exchanging
Christmas salutations, aggravated the poor colonel's sense of
homelessness, and seemed to mock it. One window displayed a huge
boar's head, grinning, with a lemon in its mouth. The proprietor of
another had hung his seasonable wares on a small spruce fir, and lit
it all over with coloured candles. A poulterer, three doors away,
had draped his house-front, from the third story down, with what at
first glance appeared to be a single heavy curtain of furs and
feathers--string upon string of hares, of pheasants, of turkeys, fat
geese, wild ducks.

This prevailing superabundant good cheer did not, however, extend to
the visitor, as the colonel discovered, within the doorway of The
Dragon. Nor was that doorway the old hospitable entrance through
which the stage-coaches had rattled into a paved court lined with
red-windowed offices. The new proprietor had blocked all this up
with a flight of steps, and an arrangement of mahogany and
plate-glass. There remained but the arch under which, these years
ago, the stout coachman, as he swung his leaders sharp round to the
entry, had warned passengers to duck their heads. The colonel was
staring up at it when he became aware of