The door of one of the houses in this lost corner of York opened softly on the evening of the twenty-third of September, eighteen hundred and forty-six; and a solitary individual of the male sex sauntered into Skeldergate from the seclusion of Rosemary Lane.

Turning northward, this person directed his steps toward the bridge over the Ouse and the busy center of the city.  He bore the external appearance of respectable poverty; he carried a gingham umbrella, preserved in an oilskin case; he picked his steps, with the neatest avoidance of all dirty places on the pavement; and he surveyed the scene around him with eyes of two different colors—­a bilious brown eye on the lookout for employment, and a bilious green eye in a similar predicament.  In plainer terms, the stranger from Rosemary Lane was no other than—­Captain Wragge.

Outwardly speaking, the captain had not altered for the better since the memorable spring day when he had presented himself to Miss Garth at the lodge-gate at Combe-Raven.  The railway mania of that famous year had attacked even the wary Wragge; had withdrawn him from his customary pursuits; and had left him prostrate in the end, like many a better man.  He had lost his clerical appearance—­he had faded with the autumn leaves.  His crape hat-band had put itself in brown mourning for its own bereavement of black.  His dingy white collar and cravat had died the death of old linen, and had gone to their long home at the paper-maker’s, to live again one day in quires at a stationer’s shop.  A gray shooting-jacket in the last stage of woolen atrophy replaced the black frockcoat of former times, and, like a faithful servant, kept the dark secret of its master’s linen from the eyes of a prying world.  From top to toe every square inch of the captain’s clothing was altered for the worse; but the man himself remained unchanged—­superior to all forms of moral mildew, impervious to the action of social rust.  He was as courteous, as persuasive, as blandly dignified as ever.  He carried his head as high without a shirt-collar as ever he had carried it with one.  The threadbare black handkerchief round his neck was perfectly tied; his rotten old shoes were neatly blacked; he might have compared chins, in the matter of smooth shaving, with the highest church dignitary in York.  Time, change, and poverty had all attacked the captain together, and had all failed alike to get him down on the ground.  He paced the streets of York, a man superior to clothes and circumstances—­his vagabond varnish as bright on him as ever.

Arrived at the bridge, Captain Wragge stopped and looked idly over the parapet at the barges in the river.  It was plainly evident that he had no particular destination to reach and nothing whatever to do.  While he was still loitering, the clock of York Minster chimed the half-hour past five.  Cabs rattled by him over the bridge on their way to meet the train from London, at twenty minutes to six.  After a moment’s hesitation, the captain sauntered after the cabs.  When it is one of a man’s regular habits to live upon his fellow-creatures, that man is always more or less fond of haunting large railway stations.  Captain Wragge gleaned the human field, and on that unoccupied afternoon the York terminus was as likely a corner to look about in as any other.