He was stronger, too, in body, more capable of the day-after-day walks that were required of him.  He had saved some money from his allowance as bedesman and from his pension, and might occasionally have taken an outside place on a coach, had it not been that he shrank from the first look of every stranger upon his disfigured face.  Yet the gentle, wistful eyes, and the white and faultless teeth always did away with the first impression as soon as people became a little acquainted with his appearance.

It was February when Philip left St Sepulchre’s.  It was the first week in April when he began to recognize the familiar objects between York and Monkshaven.  And now he began to hang back, and to question the wisdom of what he had done—­just as the warden had prophesied that he would.  The last night of his two hundred mile walk he slept at the little inn at which he had been enlisted nearly two years before.  It was by no intention of his that he rested at that identical place.  Night was drawing on; and, in making, as he thought, a short cut, he had missed his way, and was fain to seek shelter where he might find it.  But it brought him very straight face to face with his life at that time, and ever since.  His mad, wild hopes—­half the result of intoxication, as he now knew—­all dead and gone; the career then freshly opening shut up against him now; his youthful strength and health changed into premature infirmity, and the home and the love that should have opened wide its doors to console him for all, why in two years Death might have been busy, and taken away from him his last feeble chance of the faint happiness of seeing his beloved without being seen or known of her.  All that night and all the next day, the fear of Sylvia’s possible death overclouded his heart.  It was strange that he had hardly ever thought of this before; so strange, that now, when the terror came, it took possession of him, and he could almost have sworn that she must be lying dead in Monkshaven churchyard.  Or was it little Bella, that blooming, lovely babe, whom he was never to see again?  There was the tolling of mournful bells in the distant air to his disturbed fancy, and the cry of the happy birds, the plaintive bleating of the new-dropped lambs, were all omens of evil import to him.

As well as he could, he found his way back to Monkshaven, over the wild heights and moors he had crossed on that black day of misery; why he should have chosen that path he could not tell—­it was as if he were led, and had no free will of his own.

The soft clear evening was drawing on, and his heart beat thick, and then stopped, only to start again with fresh violence.  There he was, at the top of the long, steep lane that was in some parts a literal staircase leading down from the hill-top into the High Street, through the very entry up which he had passed when he shrank away from his former and his then present life.  There he stood, looking down once more at the numerous irregular roofs, the many stacks of chimneys below him, seeking out that which had once been his own dwelling—­who dwelt there now?