ilk. I
must be ready when she comes." And at those words her heart felt like a
lump of ice.

Always that girl! And without again attracting his attention she went
away. As she passed out through the garden she saw him at the window
holding a cup of milk, from which the steam was rising.

CHAPTER XXVI

THIRD PILGRIMAGE TO HOUND STREET

Like water, human character will find its level; and Nature, with her
way of fitting men to their environment, had made young Martin Stone
what Stephen called a "Sanitist." There had been nothing else for her to
do with him.

This young man had come into the social scheme at a moment when the
conception of existence as a present life corrected by a life to
come, was tottering; and the conception of the world as an upper-class
preserve somewhat seriously disturbed.

Losing his father and mother at an early age, and brought up till he was
fourteen by Mr. Stone, he had formed the habit of thinking for himself.
This had rendered him unpopular, and added force to the essential
single-heartedness transmitted to him through his grandfather. A
particular aversion to the sights and scenes of suffering, which had
caused him as a child to object to killing flies, and to watching
rabbits caught in traps, had been regulated by his training as a
doctor. His fleshly horror of pain and ugliness was now disciplined, his
spiritual dislike of them forced into a philosophy. The peculiar chaos
surrounding all young men who live in large towns and think at all, had
made him gradually reject all abstract speculation; but a certain
fire of aspiration coming, we may suppose, through Mr. Stone, had
nevertheless impelled him to embrace something with all his might. He
had therefore embraced health. And living, as he did, in the Euston
Road, to be in touch with things, he had every need of the health which
he embraced.

Late in the afternoon of the day when Hughs had committed his assault,
having three hours of respite from his hospital, Martin dipped his face
and head into cold water, rubbed them with a corrugated towel, put on a
hard bowler hat, took a thick stick in his hand, and went by Underground
to Kensington.

With his usual cool, high-handed air he entered his aunt's house, and
asked for Thyme. Faithful to his definite, if somewhat crude theory,
that Stephen and Cecilia and all their sort were amateurs, he never
inquired for them, though not unfrequently he would, while waiting,
stroll into