as. Quite a reliable man. Only say the word, and I
will run off to Adam Street and engage him definitely."

"Very well. You engage the locum tenens, and I will be prepared to
start for Woodford as soon as he turns up."

"Excellent!" said Thorndyke. "That is a great weight off my mind. And
if you could manage to drop in this evening and smoke a pipe with us we
could talk over the plan of campaign and let you know what items of
information we are particularly in want of."

I promised to turn up at King's Bench Walk as soon after half-past
eight as possible, and my two friends then took their departure,
leaving me to set out in high spirits on my scanty round of visits.

It is surprising what different aspects things present from different
points of view; how relative are our estimates of the conditions and
circumstances of life. To the urban workman--the journeyman baker or
tailor, for instance, laboring year in year out in a single building--a
holiday ramble on Hampstead Heath is a veritable voyage of discovery;
whereas to the sailor the shifting panorama of the whole wide world is
but the commonplace of the day's work.

So I reflected as I took my place in the train at Liverpool Street on
the following day. There had been a time when a trip by rail to the
borders of Epping Forest would have been far from a thrilling
experience; now, after vegetating in the little world of Fetter Lane,
it was quite an adventure.

The enforced inactivity of a railway journey is favorable to thought,
and I had much to think about. The last few weeks had witnessed
momentous changes in my outlook. New interests had arisen, new
friendships had grown up, and above all, there had stolen into my life
that supreme influence that, for good or for evil, according to my
fortune, was to color and pervade it even to its close. Those few days
of companionable labor in the reading-room, with the homely
hospitalities of the milk-shop and the pleasant walks homeward through
the friendly London streets, had called into existence a new world--a
world in which the gracious personality of Ruth Bellingham was the one
dominating reality. And thus, as I leaned back in the corner of the
railway carriage with an unlighted pipe in my hand, the events of the
immediate past, together with those more problematical ones of the
impending future, occupied me rather to the exclusion of the business
of the moment, which was to review the remains collected