nking him for his care of her; refused
Grey's pressing invitation to tea, and set his face eastward.
Bitterer and more wild and more scornful grew his thoughts as he
strode along past the Abbey, and up Whitehall, and away down the
Strand, holding on over the crossings without paying the
slightest heed to vehicle, or horse, or man. Incensed coachmen
had to pull up with a jerk to avoid running over him, and more
than one sturdy walker turned round in indignation at a collision
which they felt had been intended, or at least which there had
been no effort to avoid.

As he passed under the window of the Banqueting Hall, and by the
place in Charing Cross where the pillory used to stand, he
growled to himself what a pity it was that the times for cutting
off heads and cropping ears had gone by. The whole of the dense
population from either side of the Strand seemed to have crowded
out into that thoroughfare to impede his march and aggravate him.
The further eastward he got, the thicker got the crowd, and the
vans, the omnibuses, the cabs, seemed to multiply and get
noisier. Not an altogether pleasant sight to a man in the most
Christian frame of mind is the crowd that a fine summer evening
fetches out into the roaring Strand, as the sun fetches out flies
on the window of a village grocery. To him just then it was at
once depressing and provoking, and he went shouldering his way
towards Temple Bar as thoroughly out of tune as he had been for
many a long day.

As he passed from the narrowest part of the Strand into the space
round St. Clement Danes' church, he was startled, in a momentary
lull of the uproar, by the sound of chiming bells. He slackened
his pace to listen; but a huge van lumbered by, shaking the
houses on both sides, and drowning all sounds but its own rattle;
and then he found himself suddenly immersed in a crowd,
vociferating and gesticulating round a policeman, who was
conveying a woman towards the station-house. He shouldered
through it--another lull came, and with it the same slow, gentle,
calm cadence of chiming bells. Again and again he caught it as he
passed on to Temple Bar; whenever the roar subsided, the notes of
the old hymn tune came dropping down on him like balm from the
air. If the ancient benefactor who caused the bells of St.
Clement Danes' Church to be arranged to play that chime so many
times a day is allowed to hover round the steeple at such times,
to watch the effect of his benefaction