Julia, though she had laughed and often smiled, now sat looking subdued with grief and disgrace. It was horrible to the feelings of a lady to possess such a stepmother as the wretch who owned the little dog that bit, and horrible also to hear her represented and dramatised in the language of Bax in the presence of the man who, as God had willed it, seemed the only friend she possessed in this wide world. Nevertheless, they continued talking until eleven o'clock, by which hour Bax had grown too maudlin for human companionship. Julia went to bed, and Bax rolled through the door to the back premises to send his daughter to the young sailor. All that he requested was a rug, a blanket, and a pillow, and then when the house was locked up, and Miss Bax had bid him goodnight, he turned down the lamp, snugged himself on the sofa, and lay listening to Miss Julia's restless pacing overhead. There was sleeplessness in her walk; but the delicate tramp of her tireless feet ceased at last. He thought of her in her loneliness, and pity moved his heart, and he vowed that he would see her in safety, buoyed by a full promise of independence in the future, before he left England. The window stood open a little way, and all night-sounds were clear. The stream babbled in the road, and its voice was like the syllabling of the perfumes stealing darkling down into the valley. He heard the distant hooting of owls like the crying of idiot boys, one seeking the other, and the thin thunder of the distant railway was a night-sound, together with the shuddering of the dry autumn leaves upon the boughs as though the trees shivered to the chill of the passing moan of air. And then Hardy fell asleep. CHAPTER III. THE EAST INDIA DOCK ROAD At about two o'clock on the following day a cab of the old type, with rattling windows, straw as though fresh from the tramp of swine, a wheezing cabman, encumbered with capes, shawls, and rugs, with nothing but a drunken nose glowing under the sallow brim of a rain-bronzed hat--this old cab, with a corded trunk hopping on top of it betwixt the iron fencing, drew up at a house in the East India Dock Road. Mr. Hardy, the gentleman whom we left asleep on the sofa in Bax's farm, got out, leaving Miss Julia Armstrong sitting in a cab, and knocked on the door, which was opened in a few moments by a little woman in the clothes of a widow, clean and neat in person, with a wistful eye which softened her face into a look of kindness. "Glad to see you, Mr. Hardy," she immediately said. "I got your letter, sir. Your room's quite ready." "Well, I can't say I'm glad to see _you_, Mrs. Brierley, because you know what seeing you means to me. Did your husband love the stowing job, and the hauling out through the gates, with a crowd of drunken Dagos on the fok'sle, and the dockmaster bursting blood-vessels in expostulations to the mud pilot?"