"I'll be round in the morning--on my way to the City.
Good-bye till then."


CHAPTER IV


IN Charing Cross station, the next afternoon,
Mr. Thorpe discovered by the big clock overhead that he
had arrived fully ten minutes too soon. This deviation
from his deeply-rooted habit of catching trains at
the last possible moment did not take him by surprise.
He smiled dryly, aud nodded to the illuminated dial,
as if they shared the secret of some quaint novelty.
This getting to the station ahead of time was of a piece
with what had been happening all day--merely one more token
of the general upheaval in the routine of his life.

From early morning he had been acutely conscious of the
feeling that his old manners and usages and methods
of thought--the thousand familiar things that made up
the Thorpe he had been--were becoming strange to him.
They fitted him no longer; they began to fall away
from him. Now, as he stood here on the bustling platform,
it was as if they had all disappeared--been left somewhere
behind him outside the station. With the two large bags
which the porter was looking after--both of a quite
disconcerting freshness of aspect--and the new overcoat
and shining hat, he seemed to himself a new kind of being,
embarked upon a voyage of discovery in the unknown.