be more evident than usual to-day.  I met half-a-dozen people I knew, and had as many pieces of news confided to me.  I went up and down the length of the High Street.  I made a small purchase or two.  And then I turned homeward, despising myself, yet finding no alternative within my reach.  Would a long country walk have been more virtuous?  It would at least have been more wholesome; but that was all that could be said.  My mind did not dwell on Morphew’s communication.  It seemed without sense or meaning to me; and after the excellent joke about his superior interest in his master to mine in my father, was dismissed lightly enough from my mind.  I tried to invent some way of telling this to my father without letting him perceive that Morphew had been finding faults in him, or I listening; for it seemed a pity to lose so good a joke.  However, as I returned home, something happened which put the joke entirely out of my head.  It is curious when a new subject of trouble or anxiety has been suggested to the mind in an unexpected way, how often a second advertisement follows immediately after the first, and gives to that a potency which in itself it had not possessed.

I was approaching our own door, wondering whether my father had gone, and whether, on my return, I should find him at leisure,—­for I had several little things to say to him,—­when I noticed a poor woman lingering about the closed gates.  She had a baby sleeping in her arms.  It was a spring night, the stars shining in the twilight, and everything soft and dim; and the woman’s figure was like a shadow, flitting about, now here, now there, on one side or another of the gate.  She stopped when she saw me approaching, and hesitated for a moment, then seemed to take a sudden resolution.  I watched her without knowing, with a prevision that she was going to address me, though with no sort of idea as to the subject of her address.  She came up to me doubtfully, it seemed, yet certainly, as I felt, and when she was close to me, dropped a sort of hesitating curtsey, and said, “It’s Mr. Philip?” in a low voice.

“What do you want with me?” I said.

Then she poured forth suddenly, without warning or preparation, her long speech,—­a flood of words which must have been all ready and waiting at the doors of her lips for utterance.  “Oh, sir, I want to speak to you!  I can’t believe you’ll be so hard, for you’re young; and I can’t believe he’ll be so hard if so be as his own son, as I’ve always heard he had but one, ’ll speak up for us.  Oh, gentleman, it is easy for the likes of you, that, if you ain’t comfortable in one room, can just walk into another; but if one room is all you have, and every bit of furniture you have taken out of it, and nothing but the four walls left,—­not so much as the cradle for the child, or a chair for your man to sit down upon when he comes from his work, or a saucepan to cook him his supper—­”

“My good woman,” I said, “who can have taken all that from you?  Surely nobody can be so cruel?”