She sought her friend Miss Tippit.  To Miss Tippit the experience was not new.  She had herself in her humble way imagined schemes of usefulness, which were broken through personal unfitness; she knew how at last the man who thinks he will conquer a continent has to be content with the conquest of his own kitchen-garden, fifty feet by twenty.  She knew this in her own humble way, although her ambition, so far from being continental, had never extended even to a parish.  She, however, could do Miriam no good.  She had learned how to vanquish her own trouble, but she was powerless against the very same trouble in another person.  She had the sense, too, for she was no bigot, to see her helplessness, and she gave Miriam the best of all advice—­to go home to Cowfold.  Alpine air, Italian cities, would perhaps have been better, bat as these were impossible, Cowfold was the next best.  Perhaps the worst effect of great cities, at any rate of English cities, is not the poverty they create and the misery which it brings, but the mental mischief which is wrought, often unconsciously, by their dreariness and darkness.  In Pimlico or Bethnal Green a man might have a fortune given him, and it would not stir him to so much gratitude as an orange if he were living on the South Downs, and the peculiar sourness of modern democracy is due perhaps to deficiency of oxygen and sunlight.  Miriam had no objection to return.  She was beaten and indifferent; her father and mother wrote to welcome her, and she recollected her mother’s devotion to her when she was ill.  She had not the heart to travel by the road on which she and Andrew came to London, and she chose a longer route by which she was brought to a point about ten miles from Cowfold.  She found affection and peace, and Andrew, who had lost his taste for whisky, was quietly at work in his father’s shop at his old trade.  There was at the same time no vacant space for her in the household.  There was nothing particular for her to do, and after a while, when the novelty of return had worn off, she grew weary, and longed unconsciously for something on which fully to exercise her useless strength.

In Cowfold at that time dwelt a basketmaker named Didymus Farrow.  Why he was called Didymus is a very simple story.

His mother had once heard a sermon preached by a bishop from the text, “Then said Thomas, which is called Didymus, unto his fellow-disciples, Let us also go, that we may die with Him.”  The preacher enlarged on the blessed privilege offered by our Lord, and observed how happy he should have been—­how happy all his dear brethren in Christ would have been, if the same privilege had been extended to them.  But, alas!  God had not so decreed.  When the day arrived on which they would see their Master in glory, they could then assure Him, and He would believe them, how willingly they would have borne His cross—­aye, and even have hung with Him on the fatal tree.