fancy whispered to him that if he were alive
then, he would be beyond the sea and forgotten; she married, rich,
proud, happy. There was no more reason why she should remember him with
any interest in such an altered state of things, than any plaything she
ever had. No, not so much.

Yet Walter so idealised the pretty child whom he had found wandering in
the rough streets, and so identified her with her innocent gratitude
of that night and the simplicity and truth of its expression, that he
blushed for himself as a libeller when he argued that she could ever
grow proud. On the other hand, his meditations were of that fantastic
order that it seemed hardly less libellous in him to imagine her grown a
woman: to think of her as anything but the same artless, gentle, winning
little creature, that she had been in the days of Good Mrs Brown. In
a word, Walter found out that to reason with himself about Florence at
all, was to become very unreasonable indeed; and that he could do
no better than preserve her image in his mind as something precious,
unattainable, unchangeable, and indefinite--indefinite in all but its
power of giving him pleasure, and restraining him like an angel's hand
from anything unworthy.

It was a long stroll in the fields that Walter took that day, listening
to the birds, and the Sunday bells, and the softened murmur of the
town--breathing sweet scents; glancing sometimes at the dim horizon
beyond which his voyage and his place of destination lay; then looking
round on the green English grass and the home landscape. But he hardly
once thought, even of going away, distinctly; and seemed to put off
reflection idly, from hour to hour, and from minute to minute, while he
yet went on reflecting all the time.

Walter had left the fields behind him, and was plodding homeward in
the same abstracted mood, when he heard a shout from a man, and then
a woman's voice calling to him loudly by name. Turning quickly in his
surprise, he saw that a hackney-coach, going in the contrary direction,
had stopped at no great distance; that the coachman was looking back
from his box and making signals to him with his whip; and that a young
woman inside was leaning out of the window, and beckoning with immense
energy. Running up to this coach, he found that the young woman was
Miss Nipper, and that Miss Nipper was in such a flutter as to be almost
beside herself.

'Staggs's Gardens, Mr Walter!' said Miss Nipper; 'if you please,