ife, he told himself--and lonely, since
Sally had left him a week or two ago. He was intolerably dull, and
Sally's letter, which lay open on the table, brimful as it was of new
energies and interests, had set him wondering whether he could continue
his present course of life much longer. There was positively no one
left in the village, at present, with whom he could interchange an idea.

Mr. Curzon, with whom, in the last three months, he had become fairly
intimate, had gone to his new field of work, leaving a blank behind him
in every house in the place; his successor had not yet arrived. "And
we are not likely to have much in common when he does come," Paul
thought, with a smile. May Webster, after manfully fulfilling her
purpose of helping in the village until the trouble and distress,
brought by the fever, had passed away, had returned to London; and it
was little enough that Paul had seen of her whilst she had been there.
And that very day Paul had received a letter from Mrs. Webster to tell
him that at Michaelmas she wished to vacate the Court, which she now
kept on as a yearly tenant.

"It cannot matter to me," Paul said to himself. "In many ways, of
course, it is the best thing that could happen." And yet he found
himself thinking of nothing but the utter desolation of Rudham, when
May's bright presence should be removed from it, when he could no
longer hope for a passing glimpse of her in the street.

"I have vegetated down here until I run a risk of softening of the
brain," he said aloud. "I must have change. I'll be off to London for
a week, put up at my club, see a few of my friends, and unearth Sally
in her new quarters."

The thought had scarcely formed itself before he began to carry it into
execution: putting together his papers, looking out a convenient train.
And, shoving his head inside the door of the Macdonald's sitting-room,
he enlisted Mrs. Macdonald's help in the matter of packing.

"Rather sudden, sir, isn't it?" she said, as she knelt upon the floor
in the centre of the clothes which Paul had pulled out of his drawers
and littered about in hopeless confusion. "It's bad enough to lose
Miss Sally, but John and I won't know ourselves when you've gone too."

"It won't be for very long," said Paul, good-humouredly, grateful to
discover that anybody would miss him, and careful to suppress the fact
that he was dull.

Arrived in London the stir and bustle of the streets was as refreshin