more evident than usual to-day. I met half-a-dozen people I knew, and had
as many pieces of news confided to me. I went up and down the length of
the High Street. I made a small purchase or two. And then I turned
homeward, despising myself, yet finding no alternative within my reach.
Would a long country walk have been more virtuous? It would at least have
been more wholesome; but that was all that could be said. My mind did
not dwell on Morphew's communication. It seemed without sense or meaning
to me; and after the excellent joke about his superior interest in his
master to mine in my father, was dismissed lightly enough from my mind. I
tried to invent some way of telling this to my father without letting him
perceive that Morphew had been finding faults in him, or I listening; for
it seemed a pity to lose so good a joke. However, as I returned home,
something happened which put the joke entirely out of my head. It is
curious when a new subject of trouble or anxiety has been suggested to
the mind in an unexpected way, how often a second advertisement follows
immediately after the first, and gives to that a potency which in itself
it had not possessed.

I was approaching our own door, wondering whether my father had gone, and
whether, on my return, I should find him at leisure,--for I had several
little things to say to him,--when I noticed a poor woman lingering about
the closed gates. She had a baby sleeping in her arms. It was a spring
night, the stars shining in the twilight, and everything soft and dim;
and the woman's figure was like a shadow, flitting about, now here, now
there, on one side or another of the gate. She stopped when she saw me
approaching, and hesitated for a moment, then seemed to take a sudden
resolution. I watched her without knowing, with a prevision that she was
going to address me, though with no sort of idea as to the subject of her
address. She came up to me doubtfully, it seemed, yet certainly, as I
felt, and when she was close to me, dropped a sort of hesitating curtsey,