Having said this, very carelessly and indifferently, Mr. Wilmot left the shop: but though he was now as well dressed and as gentlemanly-looking as any man in Southampton, he turned into the first by-street, and hurried away from the town to a lonely walk beside the water. He walked along the shore until he came to a village near the river, and about a couple of miles from Southampton. There he entered a low-roofed little public-house, very quiet and unfrequented, ordered some brandy and cold water of a girl who was seated at work behind the bar, and then went into the parlour,—a low-ceilinged, wainscoted room, whose walls were adorned here and there with auctioneers' announcements of coming sales of live and dead stock, farm-houses, and farming implements, interspersed with railway time-tables. Mr. Joseph Wilmot had this room all to himself. He seated himself by the open window, took up a country newspaper, and tried to read. But that attempt was a most dismal failure. In the first place, there was very little in the paper to read: and in the second, Joseph Wilmot would have been unable to chain his attention to the page upon which his eyes were fixed, though all the wisdom of the world had been concentrated upon that one sheet of printed paper. No; he could not read. He could only think. He could only think of this strange chance which had come to him after five-and-thirty weary years. He could only think of his probable meeting with Henry Dunbar. He entered the village public-house at a little after one, and he stayed there throughout the rest of the day, drinking brandy-and-water—not immoderately: he was very careful and watchful of himself in that matter—taking a snack of bread and cold meat for his dinner, and thinking of Henry Dunbar. In that he never varied, let him do what he would. In the railway carriage, at the Basingstoke inn, at the station, through the long sleepless night at the public-house by the water, in the tailor's shop, even when he was most occupied by the choice of his clothes, he had still thought of Henry Dunbar. From the time of his meeting the old clerk at the Waterloo terminus, he had never ceased to think of Henry Dunbar. He never once thought of his brother: not so much even as to wonder whether the stroke had been fatal,—whether the old man was yet dead. He never thought of his daughter, or the anguish his prolonged absence might cause her to suffer. He had put away the past as if it had never been, and concentrated all the force of his mind upon the one idea which possessed him like some strong demon. Sometimes a sudden terror seized him. What if Henry Dunbar should have died upon the passage home? What if the _Electra_ should bring nothing but a sealed leaden coffin, and a corpse embalmed in spirit? No, he could not imagine that! Fate, darkly brooding over these two men throughout half a long lifetime, had held them asunder for five-and-thirty years, to fling them mysteriously together now.