ng Cross station, the next afternoon, Mr. Thorpe discovered by
the big clock overhead that he had arrived fully ten minutes too soon.
This deviation from his deeply-rooted habit of catching trains at the
last possible moment did not take him by surprise. He smiled dryly, aud
nodded to the illuminated dial, as if they shared the secret of some
quaint novelty. This getting to the station ahead of time was of a
piece with what had been happening all day--merely one more token of the
general upheaval in the routine of his life.

From early morning he had been acutely conscious of the feeling that
his old manners and usages and methods of thought--the thousand familiar
things that made up the Thorpe he had been--were becoming strange to
him. They fitted him no longer; they began to fall away from him. Now,
as he stood here on the bustling platform, it was as if they had all
disappeared--been left somewhere behind him outside the station. With
the two large bags which the porter was looking after--both of a quite
disconcerting freshness of aspect--and the new overcoat and shining
hat, he seemed to himself a new kind of being, embarked upon a voyage of
discovery in the unknown.

Even his face was new. A sudden and irresistible impulse had led him to
the barber-shop in his hotel at the outset; he could not wait till after
breakfast to have his beard removed. The result, when he beheld it in
the mirror, had not been altogether reassuring. The over-long, thin,
tawny moustasche which survived the razor assumed an undue prominence;
the jaw and chin, revealed now for the first time in perhaps a dozen
years, seemed of a sickly colour, and, in some inexplicable way,
misshapen. Many times during the day, at his office, at the restaurant
where he lunched, at various outfitters' shops which he had visited, he
had pursued the task of getting reconciled to this novel visage in the
looking-glass. The little mirrors in the hansom cabs had helped him most
in this endeavour. Each returned to him an image so different from all
the others--some cadaverous, some bloated, but each with a spontaneous
distortion of its own--that it had become possible for him to strike an
average tolerable to himself, and to believe in it.

His sister had recognized him upon the instant, when he entered the old
book-shop to get the money promised overnight, but in the City his
own clerks had not known him at first. There was in this an inspiring
implication that h