Four weeks later, Mavis got out of the train at Melkbridge.  She breathed a sigh of relief when her feet touched the platform; her one regret was that she was not leaving London further away than the hundred miles which separated Melkbridge from the metropolis.  It seemed to her as if the great city were exclusively peopled with Mr. Orgles’, Mrs Hamiltons, Miss Ewers, and their like.  Ignorant of London’s kindness, she had only thought for its wickedness.  With the exception of one incident, she had resolved to forget as much as possible of her existence since she had left Brandenburg College; also, to see what happiness she could wrest from life in the capacity of clerk in the Melkbridge boot manufactory, a position she owed to her long delayed appeal to Mr Devitt for employment.  The one incident that she cared to dwell upon was her meeting with Windebank and the kindly concern he had exhibited in her welfare.  The morning following upon her encounter with him, she had long debated, without arriving at any conclusion, whether she had done well, or otherwise, in leaving him as she had done.  As the days passed, if things seemed inclined to go happily with her, she was glad that she had put an end to their budding friendship, to regret her behaviour when vexed by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

Her few hours’ acquaintance with Windebank had ruffled the surface of the deep, unexplored waters of the girl’s passion, which, rightly or wrongly, caused her to surrender her personal preferences and to regard the matter entirely from the man’s point of view.  This self-abasement was, largely, the result of the girl’s natural instincts where her affections were concerned; these had been reinforced by the sentimental pabulum which enters so much into the fiction that is devoured by girls of Mavis’ age and habit of thought.  She argued how it would be criminally selfish of her to presume on his boyish attachment of the old days, which might lead him to believe that it was a duty for him to extend to his old-time playmate the lifelong protection of marriage.

Her lack of personal vanity was such that it never once occurred to her that she was eminently desirable in his eyes; that he wished for nothing better than for her to bestow herself, together with her affections, upon him for lifelong appreciation.  She resolved to stifle her inclinations in order that the man’s career should not suffer from legal companionship with a portionless, friendless girl.

Her unselfish resolutions faltered somewhat when, in resuming the weary search for chances of employment in the advertising columns of the newspapers, she came across the following, which was every day repeated for the remainder of the week:—­

“To M...s, who foolishly lost herself in the fog on the night of last Thursday.  She is earnestly urged to write to me, care of Taylor & Wintle, 43 Lincoln’s Inn Fields.  Do not let foolish scruples delay you from letting me hear from you.”