ue of human beings. "Man wanders
back to the fields which bred him."

After a talk with a helpful porter he found rooms in a temperance hotel
in the Highgate--a comfortable quiet place.

The next day he was too tired to rise, and spent rather a dreary day in
his rooms with the _Scotsman_ for sole companion.

The landlord, a cheery little man, found time once or twice to talk for
a few minutes, but he had only been ten years in Priorsford and could
tell his guest nothing of the people he had once known.

"D'you know a house called The Rigs?" he asked him.

The landlord knew it well--a quaint cottage with a pretty garden. Old
Miss Alison Jardine was living in it when he came first to Priorsford;
dead now, but the young folk were still in it.

"Young folk?" said Peter Reid.

"Yes," said the landlord, "Miss Jean Jardine and her brothers. Orphans,
I'm told. Father an Anglo-Indian. Nice people? Oh, very. Quiet and
inoffensive. They don't own the house, though. I hear the landlord is a
very wealthy man in London. By the way, same name as yourself, sir."

"Do I look like a millionaire?" asked Peter Reid, and the landlord
laughed pleasantly and non-committally.

The next day was sunny and Peter Reid went out for a walk. It was a
different Priorsford that he had come back to. A large draper's shop
with plate-glass windows occupied the corner where Jenny Baxter had
rolled her toffee-balls and twisted her "gundy," and where old Davy
Linton had cut joints and weighed out mince-collops accompanied by wise
weather prophecies, a smart fruiterer's shop now stood furnished with a
wealth of fruit and vegetables unimagined in his young days. There were
many handsome shops, the streets were wider and better kept, unsightly
houses had been demolished; it was a clean, prosperous-looking town, but
it was different.

Peter Reid (of London) would have been the first to carp at the
tumbledown irregular old houses, with their three steps up and three
steps down, remaining, but Peter Reid (of Priorsford) missed them. He
resented the new shops, the handsome villas, the many motors, all the
evidences of prosperity.

And why had Cuddy Brig been altered?

It had been far liker the thing, he thought--the old hump-backed bridge
with the grass and ferns growing in the crannies. He had waded in Cuddy
when he was a boy, picking his way among the broken dishes and the tin
cans, and finding wonderful adventures in the dark of the bridge; he had