They paced past. Myles hid his face more deeply in his folded arms. He heard Sebastian kiss her hand, and then their voices died away--their footsteps too, and at last Myles raised his head and changed his position. He was half puzzled at the change which had come over him, at the quiet apathy which seemed to fill his whole soul. He had heard those words spoken which he had thought would be harder than any other words for him to bear, and yet he found himself sitting on in the same place, his pulses beating no faster, his breath coming no more quickly. Such utter indifference he felt to be ominous, and yet, though he tried, he could bring no different feelings forward; he repeated to himself all that he thought he had lost, all he believed Sebastian had won--conned it over as a devotee might tell his beads, but it had no effect. He felt no special pain or indignation. And yet, when he rose with the instinctive intention of turning his steps homeward, he found that he was incapable of going home. He recoiled from the very idea of entering the house, or speaking to any one he knew. He stood reasoning within himself about it. ‘Why shouldn’t I go home? Home is surely the best place. Molly is there, and Ned. I ought to go and stay with him; he’s so ill.’ And he forced his feet towards home. But it was useless, he felt it impossible to enter the house. ‘I know what I want,’ he reasoned within himself. ‘I want a good stretch of a walk, right over the moors, and away from this smoky hole. There’s nothing like a moorland breeze for blowing away unhealthy fancies. Harry used to say so, and he’s tried it often enough, and in trouble enough, poor lad.’ He smiled. He found himself pitying Harry Ashworth with an intensity of commiseration such as he could not by any means wring out for his own sorrows. But he congratulated himself. A long, long walk, a walk of twenty miles or so, to prove to himself that he was still young and strong, and swift of foot, and that six weeks of clerkship drudgery, and six months’ alternate hot and cold, hope and fear, doubt and despair, had not impaired one iota his strength and endurance! That glorious moorland air, blowing keen and fresh, though it was pure, from the north over the top of Blackrigg! There was surely not a grief, not a solitude-nourished fear and sorrow, that its strong, bracing breath would not blow clean away! By this time he had left the park, and was walking quickly down the street in a northerly direction. He met one or two friends and acquaintances before he got fairly out of the town; he returned their salutations quite mechanically, and still walked on. Just outside Thanshope, as the suburb of Bridgefold began, there stood a well-known public-house, the _Craven Heifer_; and, as he was passing its door, some one hailed him. ‘Eh, Myles! I say, Myles, is yon you?’