This young fellow, smoking his pipe and walking along through the fine autumn-gathering evening, was the only son of the white-haired gentleman who had just withdrawn into his house. He had been to sea since he was fourteen years of age, and his name was George Hardy, and he was now chief mate of the York, an Australian clipper, twelve hundred and fifty tons burthen, then lying in the East India Docks. He was going to join her, and why he was without baggage was because he had sent his chest aboard in advance.
Formerly the railway station stood not very far distant from Doctor Hardy's house; but all about here was unimportant—it was more a district than a place. Hardy's patients, for instance, were scattered over miles, and, like the plums in a sailor's pudding, the houses were scarcely within hail of one another. The railway company, two years before this date, removed the station seven miles higher up the line, to the great consternation of the unfortunate man who had purchased the "Fox Railway Inn," then conveniently seated within a short walk of the station. Figure his horror when one morning he saw men with pickaxes uprooting the platform. The "Fox Inn" was left as desolate as Noah's Ark on Mount Ararat, and it needed three men to go through the bankruptcy court before matters began to look a little brighter for this unfortunate tavern.
There was plenty of time, and Hardy did not walk very fast. He enjoyed the sweets of the country, all the aromas of the darkling land which came along in the faint, cold, evening air. When a sailor arrives from a long voyage he makes up his mind to button the flaps of his ears to his head, and to steer a straight course for the deepest inshore recess. He does not do so because he usually brings up at the nearest grog-shop on his arrival, or makes his way to the boarding-house where he was robbed and stripped when he was last in the place, and in a short time he is away at sea again with no clothes but what he stands up in, and no bed but the bundle of hay or straw which he flings, with curses deep as the sea and dark as the ship's hold, down the hatch under which he sleeps. But it is an illustration of his hatred of salt water that he should resolve to bury himself deep inshore when he lands.
George Hardy did not belong to the class who live in boarding-houses and wear knives on their hips. He was the son of a gentleman, he was a man of taste and feeling which his seafaring life had heightened and enlarged; he had the eye of an artist and the spirit of a poet, and was too good for a calling that does not require these qualities.
The road for about four miles was very lonely. One little cottage on the right stood in an orchard and grounds which sloped to a hedge almost three-quarters of a mile down. He met nobody; once or twice a squirrel ran across the pale dust; the birds had gone to bed, there was no song; the sun had sunk, and the evening had deepened into the first of the night.
Suddenly, some distance ahead of him on the left, Hardy spied what was undoubtedly a human figure. It lay in a dry, shallow ditch with the upper part of its body a little raised, resting upon the bank under the hedge. As he approached he saw that it was a woman, and then that it was a girl in a straw hat with nothing near her in the shape of bag, bundle, or dog. She must be some wearied wayfarer who had seated herself and fallen asleep. But he did not believe this, either; on the contrary, when he was close to the figure he imagined it to be a corpse.
He put his pipe in his pocket, and stood looking at her. There was light enough to see by, but not very distinctly. He stooped and peered, and then started and exclaimed:
"By Jove, it's Julia Armstrong! What's come to her?"