At last I reached the inn--a low tiled house, with a tattered portico jutting out upon the road some ten or twelve feet, a few latticed windows, and a narrow passage, lighted by a single candle in a sconce on the wall, leading into a sanded parlor beyond a little square "bar" that looked like the inside of a cupboard, decorated with a variety of jugs, teacups, saucers, and other ware hung up in rows all round. The house was altogether a very tolerable specimen of what used to be called an ale-house in remote country districts; a place suggestive of the strictest caution about liquors, but where you might repose with confidence on an impromptu entertainment of rashers and eggs. It was exactly the sort of house that Forrester would have preferred to a well-appointed hostel in the days of our summer vagrancy, when we used to wander toward Hampstead and Highgate, avoiding beaten tracks and crowded localities, and seeking out for ourselves, whenever we could find it, a secluded "Barley Mow" shut up in a nest of orchards. He had not lost his early tastes--nor had I! That little "bar," with its innumerable samples of delft, threw me back sundry years of my life, to the time when I was free to dream or idle, to go into the haunts of men, or to desert them at will. The incident was a trifling one in itself; but it shot through my heart like a bolt of fire. It was the first time I had gone out and left Astræa alone behind me. I thought of her, seated in her lonely room, brooding over her desolation, and torturing herself with speculations upon the business in which I was engaged: while I?--I was out again on the high road, exulting in a man's privilege to act for myself, with her destiny, for good or evil, at my disposal, and possessing the power of returning into the world from whence I had drawn her, and in which she could never again appear! I?--I was at large once more, with the memories of the freedom and tranquillity I had relinquished tempting my thoughts into rebellion. And she?--alas! she never seemed in my eyes so forlorn and lost as at that moment! A single glance at the boxed-up "bar," and the honest round face, with a skin-cap over it, that gaped at me behind a complete breastwork of pewter and glass, awakened me from the state of reverie in which I had entered the house. I dare say I looked rather bewildered, like a man just shaking off a fit of abstraction, for the honest round face immediately started out of the chair which served as a socket for the body to which it belonged, and without waiting to hear me ask any questions, instantly proposed to conduct me to the gentleman up-stairs, who had been for some time expecting my arrival. I found Forrester in a small room which was reached by a flight of stairs, so sharp and precipitate, that they looked as if they were inserted on the face of the wall. Having lighted me into the room, the honest face disappeared, and left us alone together.