figure, and very noticeable amongst the motley crowd who were streaming from the train.  Once he fancied that her eyes strayed along the way by which he had left.  A moment later she was accosted by a man who had just driven into the station.  She seemed to greet him without enthusiasm.  He, on the other hand, was obviously welcoming her warmly.  He too was tall, carefully dressed and well groomed, middle aged, a type, he supposed, of the men of her world.  There was a few minutes’ conversation, then they moved across the platform to the carriage, which was drawn up waiting.  He handed her in, lingering hat in hand for a moment as though hoping for an invitation to follow her, which, however, did not come.  The carriage drove off, passing the spot where Douglas had lingered, and it seemed to him that her eyes, gazing languidly out of the window, met his, and that she started forward in her seat as though to call to him.  But the carriage received no summons to stop.  It rolled out of the station and turned westwards.  Douglas turned and followed it on foot.

* * * * *

He walked at first very much like a man in a dream, quite heedless as to direction, even without any fixed purpose before him.  Here he was, arrived after all at the first stage in his new life.  He was a free man, a living unit in this streaming horde of humanity.  Of his old life, the most pleasant memory which survived was the loneliness of the hills and moorland high above his village home.  Here he had spent whole nights with nothing but the wind and the stars and the distant sheep bells to keep him company.  Here he had woven many dreams of this future which lay now actually within his grasp.  He had stolen up the mountain path whilst the little village lay sleeping, and watched the shadows pass across the hills, and the darkness steal softly down upon the landscape stretched out like patchwork below.  Then with the night and the absence of all human sounds had come that sweet and mystical sense of loneliness which had so often brought him peace at a time when the smallness of the day’s events and the tyranny of his home life had filled him with bitterness.  It was here that courage had come to him to plan out his emancipation, here that he had fed his brain with sweet but forbidden fruits.  Something of that delicious loneliness was upon him now.  He was a wanderer in a new world.  What matter though the streets were squalid, and the men and women against whom he brushed were, for the most part, poorly dressed and ill looking?  He was free.  Even his identity was gone.  Douglas Guest was dead, and with his past Douglas Jesson had nothing to do.