Dawn is breaking, slowly, coldly, greyly, without any of the rose-coloured splendours that mostly gild the day's childhood, as the glorious delusions of youth gild our morning. There has not been a positive, actual frost in the night--not frost enough to congeal the wayside pools or to kill the dahlias--but the air has, for all that, a frosty crispness, as of the first breath of coming winter. The trees and hedgerow holly-bushes loom gigantic, formless, treble and quadruple their real size, folded round and round in a mantle of mist; the meadows are like lakes of mist; sheets of vapour steaming damply up to the shapeless, colourless, low-stooping heavens. Esther has forgotten to take any wrap: through the poor protection of her thin cotton dress and jacket the mist creeps slowly, searchingly, making her limbs shake and shudder; but she herself is unconscious of it--she could not have told you afterwards whether she had been warm or cold. At the turnpike gate a sleepy old man comes hobbling out (men at toll-gates are mostly one-legged), in his hand a candle, to which the white morning is beginning to give a very sickly, yellow look: it seems to Esther that he will never have done fumbling in his breeches-pocket for the sixpence of change that eludes his search. "Why do you stop? Cannot you go a little quicker?" asks Esther, hoarsely, her teeth chattering with cold and misery, as the groom allows his horse to walk up a long, gentle incline. "Sir Tummas allus gives pertikler horders as we should walk the 'orses up this 'ill," replies the man; "you see, 'm, it's collar-work pretty nigh all the way from our place to Brainton." "But it is such a little hill, and Sir Thomas need never know," pleads Esther, imploringly. "I have not got any money now, but if you'll take me quicker--a good deal quicker--I will send you five shillings--ten shillings--by post, when I get home." "Much obliged to you, ma'am," answers the man, touching his hat, and giving another instance of the influence of filthy lucre by whipping up his horse. "When is the next train to Berwyn?" cries Esther, almost before they had pulled up at the station, to a porter, who stands waiting to receive any arriving passengers. "7.20," replies the man, briefly. "And what time is it now?" "6.15." "Is not there one before 7.20?" "None; you are just too late for the 6.10 one; it has been gone about five minutes." Unmindful of the presence of the careless, indifferent onlookers, Esther clasps her cold hands together and groans. In a great despair, as in a great bodily agony, we do not much mind who sees or hears us. "Too late!" she says, with a heavy, tearless sob--"five minutes too late! Oh God, it _is_ hard!" "Any luggage, Miss?" asks the porter, in his civil, matter-of-fact voice.