t
when the servant locked the garden-gate behind me. I walked forward a
few paces on the shortest way back to London, then stopped and
hesitated.

The moon was full and broad in the dark blue starless sky, and the
broken ground of the heath looked wild enough in the mysterious light
to be hundreds of miles away from the great city that lay beneath it.
The idea of descending any sooner than I could help into the heat and
gloom of London repelled me. The prospect of going to bed in my
airless chambers, and the prospect of gradual suffocation, seemed, in
my present restless frame of mind and body, to be one and the same
thing. I determined to stroll home in the purer air by the most
roundabout way I could take; to follow the white winding paths across
the lonely heath; and to approach London through its most open suburb
by striking into the Finchley Road, and so getting back, in the cool of
the new morning, by the western side of the Regent's Park.

I wound my way down slowly over the heath, enjoying the divine
stillness of the scene, and admiring the soft alternations of light and
shade as they followed each other over the broken ground on every side
of me. So long as I was proceeding through this first and prettiest
part of my night walk my mind remained passively open to the
impressions produced by the view; and I thought but little on any
subject--indeed, so far as my own sensations were concerned, I can
hardly say that I thought at all.

But when I had left the heath and had turned into the by-road, where
there was less to see, the ideas naturally engendered by the
approaching change in my habits and occupations gradually drew more and
more of my attention exclusively to themselves. By the time I had
arrived at the end of the road I had become completely absorbed in my
own fanciful visions of Limmeridge House, of Mr. Fairlie, and of the
two ladies whose practice in the art of water-colour painting I was so
soon to superintend.

I had now arrived at that particular point of my walk where four roads
met--the road to Hampstead, along which I had returned, the road to
Finchley, the road to West End, and the road back to London. I had
mechanically turned in this latter direction, and was strolling along
the lonely high-road--idly wondering, I remember, what the Cumberland
young ladies would look like--when, in one moment, every drop of blood
in my body was brought to a stop by the touch of a hand laid lightly
a