"And I think she might have cleared up the fog, if you had waited a bit, Wesden."
"Why didn't she, if she could?"
"I don't know. I promised to believe in her, and somehow I do."
"Can anything in the world account for a girl her age being out all night?" said Wesden.
"Ah! that looks bad—I can't get over that!" said Mr. Hinchford, giving his head one sorrowful shake.
Poor Mattie!—poor stray! whose actions, the best and most unselfish, were not to be accounted for, or done justice to in this world.
CHAPTER II.
SIDNEY'S CONFESSION.
Sidney Hinchford escorted Harriet Wesden home to Camberwell. A most unromantic walk down the Newington Causeway—sacred to milliners and counter-skippers—the Walworth Road, Camberwell Road, and streets branching thence to melancholy suburbs—and yet a walk that was the happiest in the lives of these two, though looked back upon in after years through tear-dimmed eyes, and sighed for by hearts that had been sorely wrung. Such a walk as most of us may have taken once in life—seldom more than once—a walk away from sober realism into fairy-land, where everything apart from love was a something to be utterly despised, and where love first rose to fill our souls with promise. What if the story ended abruptly, and the waking came, and one or two of us fell heavily to earth—we did not die of the wounds, and we see now that the fall was the best thing that could have happened for us. We look back at the past, and regret not the sunshine that dazzled us there.