This time, however, he seemed to have no intention of passing the entrance--no intention, indeed, of doing anything, unless standing vacantly by the gate, and mechanically swinging it backwards and forwards with both his hands, can be considered in the light of an occupation. As for the churchyard, he hardly looked at it now. There were two or three people, at a little distance, walking about among the graves, who it might have been thought would have attracted his attention; but he never took the smallest notice of them. He was evidently meditating about something, for he soon began to talk to himself--being, like most men who have passed much of their time in solitude, unconsciously in the habit of thinking aloud. “I wonder how many year ago it is, since she and me used to swing back’ards and for’ards on this,” he said, still pushing the gate slowly to and fro. “The hinges used to creak then. They go smooth enough now. Oiled, I suppose.” As he said this, he moved his hands from the bar on which they rested, and turned away to go on to the town; but stopped, and walking back to the gate, looked attentively at its hinges--“Ah,” he said, “not oiled. New.” “New,” he repeated, walking slowly towards the High Street--“new since my time, like everything else here. I wish I’d never come back--I wish to God I’d never come back!” On getting into the town, he stopped at the same place where he had halted on his first visit to Dibbledean, to look up again, as he had looked then, at the hosier’s shop which had once belonged to Joshua Grice. Here, those visible and tangible signs and tokens which he required to stimulate his sluggish memory, were not very easy to recognize. Though the general form of his father’s old house was still preserved, the re-painting and renovating of the whole front had somewhat altered it, in its individual parts, to his eyes. He looked up and down at the gables, and all along from window to window; and shook his head discontentedly. “New again here,” he said. “I can’t make out for certain which winder it was Mary and me broke between us, when I come away from school, the year afore I went to sea. Whether it was Mary that broke the winder, and me that took the blame,” he continued, slowly pursuing his way--“or whether it was her that took the blame, and me that broke the winder, I can’t rightly call to mind. And no great wonder neither, if I’ve forgot such a thing as that, when I can’t even fix it for certain, yet, whether she used to wear her Hair Bracelet or not, while I was at home.” Communing with himself in this way, he reached the turning that led to Joanna Grice’s cottage. His thoughts had thus far been straying away idly and uninterruptedly to the past. They were now recalled abruptly to present emergencies by certain unexpected appearances which met his eye, the moment he looked down the lane along which he was walking.