treating
cloud backed the luminous haze thrown up from hundreds of
street-lamps and shop-windows--a haze that faintly silhouetted the
clustered roofs. The roofs were wet. The roadway, narrowing as it
descended the hill, shone with recent rain.

'You may carry down my bag,' said the colonel. 'I will walk.
Somewhere to the right here should be a road leading to Westgate,
eh?'

'Tisn't the shortest way,' the conductor objected.

'I have plenty of time,' said the colonel mildly.

Indeed, a milder-looking man for a hero--he had earned and won his
V.C.--or a gentler of address, could scarcely be conceived; or an
older-fashioned. His voice, to be sure, had a latent tone of
command. But the patient face, with its drooping moustache and long
gray side-whiskers; the short yet attenuated figure, in a tweed suit
of no particular cut; the round felt hat, cheap tie, and
elastic-sided boots--all these failed very signally to impress the
conductor, who flung the carpet-bag inside the omnibus with small
ceremony, and banged the door.

'Right, Bill!' he called.

''Oo is it?' asked the driver, slewing round in the light of his
near-side lamp.

'Might be a commercial--if 'twasn't for his bag, and his way of
speakin'.'

The omnibus rattled off and down the hill. Colonel Baigent gazed
after it, alone beneath the gas-lamp; for the few passengers who had
alighted from his train had jostled past him and gone their ways, and
his porter had turned back wearily into the station, where express
and excursion trains had all day been running the Christmas traffic
down to its last lees.

Colonel Baigent gazed after the omnibus, then back through the
passage-way leading past the booking-office to the platform.
All this was new to him. There had been no such thing as railway or
railway station thirty-five years ago, when, a boy of seventeen just
emancipated from school, he had climbed to the box-seat of the then
famous 'Highflyer' coach, and been driven homewards to a Christmas in
which the old sense of holiday mingled and confused itself with a new
and wonderful feeling that school was over and done with for ever.

During his Indian exile he had nursed a long affection for the city;
had collected and pored over books relating to it and its
antiquities; and now, as he left the station and struck boldly into
the footway on the right, he found himself surprisingly at home.
The path led him over a footbridge, and along between high gar