ndon?"

"London's a large place--too large for this time o' night. You come
along there one o' these days, and you'll find out what they mean." He
sketched the behaviour of Londoners towards rustic visitors
untruthfully--if our experience can be relied on--and in terms open to
censure; ending up:--"You'll find what they'll do, fast enough! Just you
show up there, one o' these fine days." He had only warped the subject
thus in order to introduce the idea of a humiliating and degrading
chastisement, as an insult to his hearer.

He vanishes from the story at this point, in a discharge of Parthian
shafts by Tommy the young railwayman, not very energetically returned,
as if he thought the contest not worth prolonging. Vanishes, that is to
say, unless he was the same man who spoke with Mrs. Keziah Solmes at
about eleven o'clock the next morning, in the road close by the Ranger's
Cottage, close to where the grey mare started on her forty-first mile,
yesterday. If this person spoke truth when he said he had come from a
station much farther off than Grantley Thorpe, he was _not_ the same
man. Otherwise, the witnesses agreed in their description of him.

Mrs. Solmes's testimony was that a man in rough grey suit--frieze or
homespun--addressed her while she was looking out for the mail-cart,
with possible letters, and asked to be directed to Ancester Towers;
which is, at this point, invisible from the road. She suspected him at
first of being a vagrant of some new sort--then of mere eccentricity.
For plenty of eccentrics came to get a sight of the Towers. She had
surmised that his object was to do so, and had told him, that as the
family were away, strangers could be admitted by orders obtainable of
Kiffin and Clewby, his lordship the Earl's agents at Grantley. He then
told her that he had walked over from Bridgport, where the Earl had no
agent. He did not wish to go over the Towers, but to inquire for a party
he was anxious to see; an old party by the name of Prichard. That was,
he said, his own name, and she was a relation of his--in fact, his
mother. He had not seen her for many a long year, and his coming would
be a bit of a surprise. He had been away in the Colonies, and had not
been able to play the part of a dutiful son, but by no choice of his
own. Coming back to England, his first thought had been to seek out the
old lady, "at the old address." But there he found the house had fallen
down, and she was gone away temporary