I was but groping yet, and I did not understand fully what I meant to do. I was but a poor thing, striving hard to get back to some life I had lost; and so it happened that I set about it as a child might have done, and in what seemed to my childish mind the simplest and most direct way. I have wondered since what I must have looked like to any one who saw me then, wandering about in search of Hammerstone Market. I have a vision of myself as being tall and thin, and gaunt and old-looking; with deep eyes that must have been pathetic in the hopeless weariness that was in their depths. My years counted as nothing; I was a shabby tired old man, going back, pathetically enough, to pick up here and there a thread of the life that had been snatched so suddenly from me. I knew of no way to reach the place of my dreams, except to walk; and I only knew dimly that it lay in a county not very far to the north of London. By little short of a miracle I found the place, after walking through the best part of a long winter night. When once I had got out of London the road had proved to be a straight one; I walked on and on with dogged persistency. By the time the morning light was beginning to break over the country that stretched before me, I was within reasonable distance of the place, and my heart was light with a hope it had not known for years. For I was coming back to the place where for a little time at least I had lived and loved and suffered--and I was to see Barbara! Even then I had no thought that she could be anything but the bright girl I had left. Time had stood still with me, and my life had been so completely a thing of dreams that she was a dream creature in my mind still; I could think of her in no other way. I came back to the place where I had known her after that lapse of twenty years, but under what different conditions! I had come there before a mere boy, with the world at my feet; I crept back now, jaded and weary and old, to look on the life I had known, and to find my lost love, who, had I but thought about the matter clearly and sanely, I must surely have understood might well be in her grave years before. The place was unchanged; the mere sight of the old houses and of the quaint High Street stirred my memory, and made me see more clearly into that past in which I was groping. I went on eagerly; I wanted to find again all that I had lost so long ago. Perhaps it was characteristic of my wasted life that it should be winter now, instead of the summer when I had first met Barbara in the woods; it was as though the joy and beauty of it all had been stripped away. But when I came to the wood at last, with the bare branches of the trees standing up nakedly against the sky, a gleam of sun struck across it, making fanciful patterns on the snow. I sat down on a fallen tree, and looked about me, with my mind clearing more and more every minute.