Instead of turning homewards as usual, he paused for a minute or so outside the iron gate, and then took the opposite direction, setting his face towards the distant country. It was only a fancy, perhaps, but it seemed to him that the atmosphere was a shade less oppressive when he turned his back upon Shadrack Basin and the steam factories which encompassed it. No rain came to cool the fever-parched city, nor had the first low note of the impending storm sounded in distant thunder. Yet that coming storm was no less a certainty. There was a strange bewilderment in the surgeon’s mind. That promise of wealth, ease, security, a more speedily-won renown, all the benefits which go hand-in-hand with the possession of ample means, had excited his brain, although it had not elated his spirits. He saw all the scheme of his future altered. No longer need he toil in this wretched district. He might at once establish himself amongst the most famous of his fellow workers; make known his new theories, his discoveries in the vast world of medical science; do good on a scale infinitely larger than that afforded by his present surroundings. It was not that he wanted to turn his back upon the suffering poor. His brightest hopes, his fondest dreams, were of the good he was to do for these. He only desired that his light might not be for ever hidden under a bushel. Strong in the belief that he could serve the whole race of man, he languished to shake off those fetters, forged by necessity, which kept him chained to this obscure corner of the earth. With the thought of his improved prospects, and all the hopes that went along with that thought, there mingled that ever-brooding care about the past. He had perceived a curious change in Lucille’s manner to-night. Could she have discovered anything? How anxious she had been to get rid of him! She had not seemed exactly cold or unkind, but her manner had been hurried, excited; as if her mind were occupied with some all-absorbing thought in which he had no part. ‘If, by some fatal chance, she had discovered the true story of her father’s fate,’ he told himself, ‘she would hardly have concealed her knowledge; she would have surely told me the truth at once, and dismissed me for ever. I cannot imagine her acting in any double or underhanded manner. Yet to-night it seemed as if she had something to hide from me.’ This fancy troubled him; and in spite of his endeavours to dismiss the suspicion as groundless, the thought recurred to him every now and then. He walked far along the Shadrack-road, farther than he had penetrated for many a day; walked on, meditative, and hardly conscious where he went, until he came to a region of deserted building-ground, upon which a few skeleton houses lifted their roofless walls to the blank sky, as if demanding of the gods wherefore the speculative builder—long since stranded on the reefy shore of the bankruptcy court—came not to finish them.