hour, and where those aforetime lessons to Esther
Gainsborough had been given. He stood and looked about him. All was
severe order and emptiness, telling that the master had been away; his
treasures were safe packed up, under lock and key, or stowed away upon
cupboard shelves; there was no pleasant litter on tables and floor,
alluring to work or play. Was that old life, of work and play which
mixed and mingled, light-hearted and sweet, gone for ever? Pitt stood
in the middle of the floor looking about him, gathering up many a
broken thread of association; and then, obeying an impulse which had
been on him all the morning, he turned, caught up his hat, and went out.

He loitered down the village street. It was mid-morning now, the summer
sun beating down on the wide space and making every big tree shadow
grateful. Great overarching elms, sometimes an oak or a maple, ranged
along in straight course and near neighbourhood, making the village
look green and bowery, and giving the impression of an easy-going
thrift and habit of pleasant conditions, which perhaps was not untrue
to the character of the people. The capital order in which everything
was kept confirmed the impression. Pitt, however, was not thinking of
this, though he noticed it; the village was familiar to him from his
childhood, and looked just as it had always done, only that the elms
and maples had grown a little more bowery with every year. He walked
along, not thinking of that, nor seeing the roses and syringa blossoms
which gave him a sweet breath out of some of the gardens. He was not in
a hurry. He was going back in mind to that which furnished the real
answer to his mother's wondering query,--whence Pitt could have got his
new ideas? It was nobody at Oxford or in London, neither conventicle
nor discourse; but a girl's letter. He went on and on, thinking of it
and of the writer. What would _she_ say to his disclosures, which his
father and mother could do nothing with? Would she be in condition to
give him the help he knew he must not expect from them? She, a girl?
who did not know the world? Yet she was the goal of Pitt's present
thoughts, and her house the point his footsteps were seeking, slowly
and thoughtfully.

He was not in a hurry. Indeed, he was too absorbedly busy with his own
cogitations and questions to give full place to the thought of Esther
and the visit he was about to make. Besides, it was not as in the old
time. He had no image before