As I crossed the railway platform, and looked right and left among the people congregated on it, to search for any faces among them that I knew, the doubt occurred to me whether it might not have been to my advantage if I had adopted a disguise before setting out for Hampshire.  But there was something so repellent to me in the idea—­something so meanly like the common herd of spies and informers in the mere act of adopting a disguise—­that I dismissed the question from consideration almost as soon as it had risen in my mind.  Even as a mere matter of expediency the proceeding was doubtful in the extreme.  If I tried the experiment at home the landlord of the house would sooner or later discover me, and would have his suspicions aroused immediately.  If I tried it away from home the same persons might see me, by the commonest accident, with the disguise and without it, and I should in that way be inviting the notice and distrust which it was my most pressing interest to avoid.  In my own character I had acted thus far—­and in my own character I was resolved to continue to the end.

The train left me at Welmingham early in the afternoon.

Is there any wilderness of sand in the deserts of Arabia, is there any prospect of desolation among the ruins of Palestine, which can rival the repelling effect on the eye, and the depressing influence on the mind, of an English country town in the first stage of its existence, and in the transition state of its prosperity?  I asked myself that question as I passed through the clean desolation, the neat ugliness, the prim torpor of the streets of Welmingham.  And the tradesmen who stared after me from their lonely shops—­the trees that drooped helpless in their arid exile of unfinished crescents and squares—­the dead house-carcasses that waited in vain for the vivifying human element to animate them with the breath of life—­every creature that I saw, every object that I passed, seemed to answer with one accord:  The deserts of Arabia are innocent of our civilised desolation—­the ruins of Palestine are incapable of our modern gloom!

I inquired my way to the quarter of the town in which Mrs. Catherick lived, and on reaching it found myself in a square of small houses, one story high.  There was a bare little plot of grass in the middle, protected by a cheap wire fence.  An elderly nursemaid and two children were standing in a corner of the enclosure, looking at a lean goat tethered to the grass.  Two foot-passengers were talking together on one side of the pavement before the houses, and an idle little boy was leading an idle little dog along by a string on the other.  I heard the dull tinkling of a piano at a distance, accompanied by the intermittent knocking of a hammer nearer at hand.  These were all the sights and sounds of life that encountered me when I entered the square.

I walked at once to the door of Number Thirteen—­the number of Mrs. Catherick’s house—­and knocked, without waiting to consider beforehand how I might best present myself when I got in.  The first necessity was to see Mrs. Catherick.  I could then judge, from my own observation, of the safest and easiest manner of approaching the object of my visit.