She said this quite earnestly, and with an air of affectionate appeal
to me which pleased me very much; but I could see that she was only
keeping her doubts about me for another time.

Presently we came to Day's Lock, where Dick and his two sitters had
waited for us. He would have me go ashore, as if to show me
something which I had never seen before; and nothing loth I followed
him, Ellen by my side, to the well-remembered Dykes, and the long
church beyond them, which was still used for various purposes by the
good folk of Dorchester: where, by the way, the village guest-house
still had the sign of the Fleur-de-luce which it used to bear in the
days when hospitality had to be bought and sold. This time, however,
I made no sign of all this being familiar to me: though as we sat
for a while on the mound of the Dykes looking up at Sinodun and its
clear-cut trench, and its sister mamelon of Whittenham, I felt
somewhat uncomfortable under Ellen's serious attentive look, which
almost drew from me the cry, "How little anything is changed here!"

We stopped again at Abingdon, which, like Wallingford, was in a way
both old and new to me, since it had been lifted out of its
nineteenth-century degradation, and otherwise was as little altered
as might be.

Sunset was in the sky as we skirted Oxford by Oseney; we stopped a
minute or two hard by the ancient castle to put Henry Morsom ashore.
It was a matter of course that so far as they could be seen from the
river, I missed none of the towers and spires of that once don-
beridden city; but the meadows all round, which, when I had last
passed through them, were getting daily more and more squalid, more
and more impressed with the seal of the "stir and intellectual life