HE was happy: even Halesby became a grateful place of retirement after his long days in North Bromwich. The mornings of early autumn were very beautiful, and it was with a good deal of zest that he would scramble through his breakfast and leave the house early to catch the eight o’clock train. He usually made use of the short cut through Mrs. Barrow’s garden and the cinder path beside the fish-ponds, and in this brisk walk, with the blood of youth running happily in his veins, he would catch a little of the exhilarating atmosphere of early morning in the country. When the frosts began, as they do early on that high plateau, the morning air seemed stronger and more bracing than ever. Circumstance, in a little more than three months, had exalted him to the state of those metropolitan season-ticket holders whose majesty he had disturbed on the day when he left St. Luke’s for good. He was now in a position to appreciate their exclusiveness, and to look upon all chance people who intruded on the privacies of the eight o’clock train with the same mingled curiosity and contempt. In every way a season ticket, in its cover of dark blue morocco, was a thing superior to the transitory and ignoble pasteboard. He could hardly resist a sigh of bored superiority on the first occasion when he produced it. He travelled second-class, thus rising to the highest level of luxury in travelling permitted to any inhabitants of Halesby, unless it were the local baronet or Mr. Willis of Mawne, whom even Sir Joseph Hingston could not outdo. Most of the other season-ticket holders travelled second; and in this way, by making a habit of taking his place in the same carriage, for sentimental reasons one that contained a series of west-country pictures, Edwin began to be on speaking terms with many members of this select company. They included a youth articled to a solicitor in North Bromwich, the son of a Halesby postmaster, who was inclined to establish terms of familiarity; a gentleman with a bloated complexion and a fawn-coloured bowler hat, reputed to be a commercial traveller, who carried a bag in which samples may well have been hidden; a superior person with a gruff voice who was a clerk in a bank in the city, and on Saturdays carried a brown canvas bag and a hockey stick; and a withered man of fifty who travelled into North Bromwich daily on some business connected with brass, and, on damp mornings, exhibited evidences of an asthmatic complaint that aroused Edwin’s budding professional interest.