CHAPTER VII 



A RAILWAY CARRIAGE SURREY SUSSEX 



I LEFT London as quickly as possible. The railway 

 carriage was nearly full of men reading the same news- 

 papers under three or four different names, when a little 

 grizzled and spectacled man of middle age entered — a 

 printer, perhaps — with a twisted face and simple and 

 puzzled expression that probably earned him many a laugh 

 from street-corner boys. As he sat down he recognized a 

 sailor, a tall, ponderous, kind-faced man made in three 

 distinct storeys, who supported his enormous red hands 

 upon knees each fit to have been the mould of a hero's 

 helmet. 



" Well, I never did, and how are you, Harry ? " 



They looked at one another kindly but with a question 

 piercing through the kindness and an effort to divine the 

 unknowable without betraying curiosity. The kindness 

 did, in fact, melt away the almost physical obstacle of 

 twenty years spent apart and in ignorance of one another. 



" When did you leave the old place ? " said the sailor. 



"Soon after you did yourself, Harry; just after the 

 shipwreck of the Wild Swan; twenty-one, twenty-two — 

 yes, twenty-two years ago." 



" Is it so long ? I could have sworn you had that 

 beard when I saw you last," and the sailor looked at him 

 in a way that showed he had already bridged the twenty- 

 two years and knew the man. 



"Yes, twenty-two years." 



" And do you ever go back to the old place ? How's 

 Charlie Nash, and young Woolford, and the shepherd? " 



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