the men stared at her as she went along the street, and for the first time in her life Hetty wished no one would look at her.  She set out walking again; but this day she was fortunate, for she was soon overtaken by a carrier’s cart which carried her to Hinckley, and by the help of a return chaise, with a drunken postilion—­who frightened her by driving like Jehu the son of Nimshi, and shouting hilarious remarks at her, twisting himself backwards on his saddle—­she was before night in the heart of woody Warwickshire:  but still almost a hundred miles from Windsor, they told her.  Oh what a large world it was, and what hard work for her to find her way in it!  She went by mistake to Stratford-on-Avon, finding Stratford set down in her list of places, and then she was told she had come a long way out of the right road.  It was not till the fifth day that she got to Stony Stratford.  That seems but a slight journey as you look at the map, or remember your own pleasant travels to and from the meadowy banks of the Avon.  But how wearily long it was to Hetty!  It seemed to her as if this country of flat fields, and hedgerows, and dotted houses, and villages, and market-towns—­all so much alike to her indifferent eyes—­must have no end, and she must go on wandering among them for ever, waiting tired at toll-gates for some cart to come, and then finding the cart went only a little way—­a very little way—­to the miller’s a mile off perhaps; and she hated going into the public houses, where she must go to get food and ask questions, because there were always men lounging there, who stared at her and joked her rudely.  Her body was very weary too with these days of new fatigue and anxiety; they had made her look more pale and worn than all the time of hidden dread she had gone through at home.  When at last she reached Stony Stratford, her impatience and weariness had become too strong for her economical caution; she determined to take the coach for the rest of the way, though it should cost her all her remaining money.  She would need nothing at Windsor but to find Arthur.  When she had paid the fare for the last coach, she had only a shilling; and as she got down at the sign of the Green Man in Windsor at twelve o’clock in the middle of the seventh day, hungry and faint, the coachman came up, and begged her to “remember him.”  She put her hand in her pocket and took out the shilling, but the tears came with the sense of exhaustion and the thought that she was giving away her last means of getting food, which she really required before she could go in search of Arthur.  As she held out the shilling, she lifted up her dark tear-filled eyes to the coachman’s face and said, “Can you give me back sixpence?”

“No, no,” he said, gruffly, “never mind—­put the shilling up again.”

The landlord of the Green Man had stood near enough to witness this scene, and he was a man whose abundant feeding served to keep his good nature, as well as his person, in high condition.  And that lovely tearful face of Hetty’s would have found out the sensitive fibre in most men.