n to you on this journey--if
you and Sir Percival meet----"

"What makes you think we shall meet?" I asked.

"I don't know--I have fears and fancies that I cannot account for.
Laugh at them, Walter, if you like--but, for God's sake, keep your
temper if you come in contact with that man!"

"Never fear, Marian! I answer for my self-control."

With those words we parted.

I walked briskly to the station. There was a glow of hope in me. There
was a growing conviction in my mind that my journey this time would not
be taken in vain. It was a fine, clear, cold morning. My nerves were
firmly strung, and I felt all the strength of my resolution stirring in
me vigorously from head to foot.

As I crossed the railway platform, and looked right and left among the
people congregated on it, to search for any faces among them that I
knew, the doubt occurred to me whether it might not have been to my
advantage if I had adopted a disguise before setting out for Hampshire.
But there was something so repellent to me in the idea--something so
meanly like the common herd of spies and informers in the mere act of
adopting a disguise--that I dismissed the question from consideration
almost as soon as it had risen in my mind. Even as a mere matter of
expediency the proceeding was doubtful in the extreme. If I tried the
experiment at home the landlord of the house would sooner or later
discover me, and would have his suspicions aroused immediately. If I
tried it away from home the same persons might see me, by the commonest
accident, with the disguise and without it, and I should in that way be
inviting the notice and distrust which it was my most pressing interest
to avoid. In my own character I had acted thus far--and in my own
character I was resolved to continue to the end.

The train left me at Welmingham early in the afternoon.

Is there any wilderness of sand in the deserts of Arabia, is there any
prospect of desolation among the ruins of Palestine, which can rival
the repelling effect on the eye, and the depressing influence on the
mind, of an English country town in the first stage of its existence,
and in the transition state of its prosperity? I asked myself that
question as I passed through the clean desolation, the neat ugliness,
the prim torpor of the streets of Welmingham. And the tradesmen who
stared after me from their lonely shops--the trees that drooped
helpless in their arid exile of unfinished crescents an