antics. At these the fellow-passengers laughed, except the solitary boy bearing the key and ticket, who, regarding the kitten with his saucer eyes, seemed mutely to say: `All laughing comes from misapprehension. Rightly looked at there is no laughable thing under the sun.'

Occasionally at a stoppage the guard would look into the compartment and say to the boy, `All right, my man. Your box is safe in the van.' The boy would say, `Yes,' without animation, would try to smile, and fail.

He was Age masquerading as Juvenility, and doing it so badly that his real self showed through crevices. A ground-swell from ancient years of night seemed now and then to lift the child in this his morning-life, when his face took a back view over some great Atlantic of Time, and appeared not to care about what it saw.

When the other travellers closed their eyes, which they did one by one - even the kitten curling itself up in the basket, weary of its too circumscribed play - the boy remained just as before. He then seemed to be doubly awake, like an enslaved and dwarfed divinity, sitting passive and regarding his companions as if he saw their whole rounded lives rather than their immediate figures.

This was Arabella's boy. With her usual carelessness she had postponed writing to Jude about him till the eve of his landing, when she could absolutely postpone no longer, though she had known for weeks of his approaching arrival, and had, as she truly said, visited Aldbrickham mainly to reveal the boy's existence and his near home-coming to Jude. This very day on which she had received her former husband's answer at some time in the afternoon, the child reached the London Docks, and the family in whose charge he had come, having put him into a cab for Lambeth and directed the cabman to his mother's house, bade him good-bye, and went their way.

On his arrival at the Three Horns, Arabella had looked him over with an expression that was as good as saying, `You are very much what I expected you to be,' had given him a good meal, a little money, and, late as it was getting, dispatched him to Jude by the next train, wishing her husband Cartlett, who was out, not to see him.

The train reached Aldbrickham, and the boy was deposited on the lonely platform beside his box. The collector took his ticket and, with a meditative sense of the unfitness of things, asked him where he was going by himself at that time of night.

`Going to Spring Street,' said the little one impassively.

`Why, that's a long way from here; a'most out in the country; and the folks will be gone to bed.'

`I've got to go there.'

`You must have a fly for your box.'

`No. I must walk.'

`Oh well: you'd better leave your box here and send for it. There's a 'bus goes half-way, but you'll have to walk the rest.'

`I am not afraid.'

`Why didn't your friends come to meet 'ee?'

`I suppose they didn't know I was coming.'

`Who is your friends?'

`Mother didn't wish me to say.'