John obeyed, yet did not obey, this injunction. He went home without lingering, but he did not go quickly. Why there should be a particular pleasure in lingering out of doors in the dark in a world unseen, where there is nothing to please either mind or eye, it would be difficult to say. But that there is, every imaginative spirit must have felt. The boy strolled along in a meditative way, dangling his lantern at his cold fingers’ end, throwing stray gleams upon the road, which gave him a fantastic half-conscious amusement but no aid, though, indeed, he did not require that, in seeing his way. The landlord of the ‘Green Man’ was still outside discoursing upon the hardship of being compelled to take a drunken brute fresh out of prison into his respectable house. ‘We’ll maybe wake up in the morning all dead corpses,’ he said, unconscious of the warrant of Scripture for the words, ‘all along of a clergyman as just fancies things.’ ‘Put him in the barn,’ said one of the loungers about, slow spirits excited by the stir of something happening, who had returned and hung about the door discussing it after the curate had passed. ‘Put him in the stable, that’s good enough for the likes of him.’ ‘I’ll put him in the loft and turn the key upon him, so as he’ll do no harm,’ said the landlord. The man, as John made out with a gleam of his lantern, was still seated on the edge of the pathway, supported against the wall, his red handkerchief showing in the light. He was muttering on in a long hoarse monologue, in which there was still audible from time to time the name of May. May! John asked himself, as he went on, how was it that he knew that name? It seemed to be so familiar to him, and yet he could not recall distinctly what the association was. Then he pondered on what the curate had said, whether by any chance there might be what he had called ‘a bit of faithfulness and human feeling’ at the bottom of the miserable fellow’s persistence. Nobody but Mr. Cattley would have thought of that, the boy said to himself; and there rose before his half-dreaming eyes a picture of some poor creature waiting for news, blessing even this wretched man for bringing them to her.