He remained in England till midsummer, and spent a month in the country, wandering about cathedrals, castles, and ruins.  Several times, taking a walk from his inn into meadows and parks, he stopped by a well-worn stile, looked across through the early evening at a gray church tower, with its dusky nimbus of thick-circling swallows, and remembered that this might have been part of the entertainment of his honeymoon.  He had never been so much alone or indulged so little in accidental dialogue.  The period of recreation appointed by Mrs. Tristram had at last expired, and he asked himself what he should do now.  Mrs. Tristram had written to him, proposing to him that he should join her in the Pyrenees; but he was not in the humor to return to France.  The simplest thing was to repair to Liverpool and embark on the first American steamer.  Newman made his way to the great seaport and secured his berth; and the night before sailing he sat in his room at the hotel, staring down, vacantly and wearily, at an open portmanteau.  A number of papers were lying upon it, which he had been meaning to look over; some of them might conveniently be destroyed.  But at last he shuffled them roughly together, and pushed them into a corner of the valise; they were business papers, and he was in no humor for sifting them.  Then he drew forth his pocket-book and took out a paper of smaller size than those he had dismissed.  He did not unfold it; he simply sat looking at the back of it.  If he had momentarily entertained the idea of destroying it, the idea quickly expired.  What the paper suggested was the feeling that lay in his innermost heart and that no reviving cheerfulness could long quench—­the feeling that after all and above all he was a good fellow wronged.  With it came a hearty hope that the Bellegardes were enjoying their suspense as to what he would do yet.  The more it was prolonged the more they would enjoy it!  He had hung fire once, yes; perhaps, in his present queer state of mind, he might hang fire again.  But he restored the little paper to his pocket-book very tenderly, and felt better for thinking of the suspense of the Bellegardes.  He felt better every time he thought of it after that, as he sailed the summer seas.  He landed in New York and journeyed across the continent to San Francisco, and nothing that he observed by the way contributed to mitigate his sense of being a good fellow wronged.

He saw a great many other good fellows—­his old friends—­but he told none of them of the trick that had been played him.  He said simply that the lady he was to have married had changed her mind, and when he was asked if he had changed his own, he said, “Suppose we change the subject.”  He told his friends that he had brought home no “new ideas” from Europe, and his conduct probably struck them as an eloquent proof of failing invention.  He took no interest in chatting about his affairs and manifested no desire to look over his accounts.  He asked half a dozen questions which, like those