He walked at first very much like a man in a dream, quite heedless as to direction, even without any fixed purpose before him. Here he was, arrived after all at the first stage in his new life. He was a free man, a living unit in this streaming horde of humanity. Of his old life, the most pleasant memory which survived was the loneliness of the hills and moorland high above his village home. Here he had spent whole nights with nothing but the wind and the stars and the distant sheep bells to keep him company. Here he had woven many dreams of this future which lay now actually within his grasp. He had stolen up the mountain path whilst the little village lay sleeping, and watched the shadows pass across the hills, and the darkness steal softly down upon the landscape stretched out like patchwork below. Then with the night and the absence of all human sounds had come that sweet and mystical sense of loneliness which had so often brought him peace at a time when the smallness of the day's events and the tyranny of his home life had filled him with bitterness. It was here that courage had come to him to plan out his emancipation, here that he had fed his brain with sweet but forbidden fruits. Something of that delicious loneliness was upon him now. He was a wanderer in a new world. What matter though the streets were squalid, and the men and women against whom he brushed were, for the most part, poorly dressed and ill looking? He was free. Even his identity was gone. Douglas Guest was dead, and with his past Douglas Jesson had nothing to do. He wandered on, asking no questions, perfectly content. The great city expanded before him. Streets became wider, carriages were more frequent, the faces of the people grew more cheerful. He laughed softly to himself from sheer lightness of heart. From down a side street he came into the Strand, and here, for the first time, he noticed that he himself was attracting some attention. Then he remembered his clothes, shabby enough, but semi-clerical, and he walked boldly into a large ready-made clothing establishment, where everything was marked in plain figures, and where layfigures of gentlemen with waxy faces, attired in the height of fashion, were gazing blandly out into the world from behind a huge plate-glass window. He bought a plain blue serge suit, and begged leave to change in the "trying-on" room. Half an hour later he walked out again, with his own clothes done up in a bundle, feeling that his emancipation was now complete.