turned to
Ellen, and she _did_ seem to recognise me for an instant; but her bright
face turned sad directly, and she shook her head with a mournful look,
and the next moment all consciousness of my presence had faded from her
face.

I felt lonely and sick at heart past the power of words to describe. I
hung about a minute longer, and then turned and went out of the porch
again and through the lime-avenue into the road, while the blackbirds
sang their strongest from the bushes about me in the hot June evening.

Once more without any conscious effort of will I set my face toward the
old house by the ford, but as I turned round the corner which led to the
remains of the village cross, I came upon a figure strangely contrasting
with the joyous, beautiful people I had left behind in the church. It
was a man who looked old, but whom I knew from habit, now half forgotten,
was really not much more than fifty. His face was rugged, and grimed
rather than dirty; his eyes dull and bleared; his body bent, his calves
thin and spindly, his feet dragging and limping. His clothing was a
mixture of dirt and rags long over-familiar to me. As I passed him he
touched his hat with some real goodwill and courtesy, and much servility.

Inexpressibly shocked, I hurried past him and hastened along the road
that led to the river and the lower end of the village; but suddenly I
saw as it were a black cloud rolling along to meet me, like a nightmare
of my childish days; and for a while I was conscious of nothing else than
being in the dark, and whether I was walking, or sitting, or lying down,
I could not tell.

* * *

I lay in my bed in my house at dingy Hammersmith thinking about it all;
and trying to consider if I was overwhelmed with despair at finding I had
been dreaming a dream; and strange to say, I found that I was not so
despairing.

Or indeed _was_ it a dream? If so, why was I so conscious all along that
I was really seeing all that new life from the outside, still wrapped up
in the prejudices, the anxieties, the distrust of this time of doubt and
struggle?

All along, though those friends were so real to me, I had been feeling as
if I had no business amongst them: as though the time would come when
they would reject me, and say, as Ellen's last mournful look seemed to
say, "No, it will not do; you cannot be of us; you belong so entirely to
the unhappiness of the past that our happiness even would weary you. Go
back agai