On the second morning after its seizure, the body of the old ex-governor was carried away in a hearse to Footover Station, thence to be conveyed to its London home. I had avoided the house in the interval, being jealous of the least suggestion of intrusion; but I hung about the drive on the day of the removal, and threw a little spray of thyme upon the hearse as it passed. So much for a beggar’s remembrance! He had always accepted me fairly, old prosperous worldling as he was, on equal terms. Then I put him resolutely out of my thoughts, and went back to my hermitage, there to mature a little scheme of adventure which I had had in my mind ever since that moment when Mr Pugsley had confessed to me the theatre (presumptive) of a certain event in which I was interested. An American humourist relates somewhere of a prisoner who had been confined for thirty years in a loathsome dungeon, when a bright idea struck him--he opened the window and got out. Now some such inspiration had seized me all in an instant. Why, in the name of perversity, was I eating my heart out in an aggrieved solitude, when simply at will I might be a traveller--a tentative explorer, at least--and be learning to ride my own destinies instead of being ridden by them? I had not yet sat, like the mythological gentleman, so long upon a rock that I had grown to it. I had means, and certainly at least a definite object in breaking into them. I would wing my test flight for that Clapham suburb which Pugsley had mentioned, and examine the ground there, at least, for subsequent exploiting. A tingle of adventure was in this as well as a vengeful resolution. It would be something, after all, to breathe a novel air into my stagnant lungs. I had lived so long remote and self-contained, that the prospect of even a Cockney suburb was a prospect potential of romance to me. No one would note my absence, and, if anyone did, how would it concern me? I was free, and my own master. And so, the very next morning, valise in hand, I strode away, walking determinedly, with no effort at concealment. I went out by the wicket, and took the road to Footover, and thence a train to Waterloo. I was young, green, gullible, no doubt; but a certain hardness of muscle and disposition was always at my service and that of others. Few minor mishaps of the way have befallen me through life, and I was early in expanding to the practical knowledge which overrides difficulties. I mention this merely to explain the ease with which my inexperience resolved these first small problems of self-dependence--my introduction to the roaring traffics of existence, to the wiles and hypocrisies of men. I spent that night at an hotel in the Waterloo Bridge Road; and my initiation into its ways profited me.