g men. One day while in lodgings at
Alfredston he had gone to Marygreen to see his old aunt, and had
observed between the brass candlesticks on her mantlepiece the
photograph of a pretty girlish face, in a broad hat with radiating
folds under the brim like the rays of a halo. He had asked who she
was. His grand-aunt had gruffly replied that she was his cousin
Sue Bridehead, of the inimical branch of the family; and on further
questioning the old woman had replied that the girl lived in
Christminster, though she did not know where, or what she was doing.

His aunt would not give him the photograph. But it haunted him; and
ultimately formed a quickening ingredient in his latent intent of
following his friend the school master thither.

He now paused at the top of a crooked and gentle declivity,
and obtained his first near view of the city. Grey-stoned and
dun-roofed, it stood within hail of the Wessex border, and almost
with the tip of one small toe within it, at the northernmost point of
the crinkled line along which the leisurely Thames strokes the fields
of that ancient kingdom. The buildings now lay quiet in the sunset,
a vane here and there on their many spires and domes giving sparkle
to a picture of sober secondary and tertiary hues.

Reaching the bottom he moved along the level way between pollard
willows growing indistinct in the twilight, and soon confronted the
outmost lamps of the town--some of those lamps which had sent into
the sky the gleam and glory that caught his strained gaze in his days
of dreaming, so many years ago. They winked their yellow eyes at him
dubiously, and as if, though they had been awaiting him all these
years in disappointment at his tarrying, they did not much want him
now.

He was a species of Dick Whittington whose spirit was touched to
finer issues than a mere material gain. He went along the outlying
streets with the cautious tread of an explorer. He saw nothing of
the real city in the suburbs on this side. His first want being a
lodging he scrutinized carefully such localities as seemed to offer
on inexpensive terms the modest type of accommodation he demanded;
and after inquiry took a room in a suburb nicknamed "Beersheba,"
though he did not know this at the time. Here he installed himself,
and having had some tea sallied forth.

It was a windy, whispering, moonless night. To guide himself he
opened under a lamp a map he had brought. The breeze ruffled and
flu