Four weeks later, Mavis got out of the train at Melkbridge. She
breathed a sigh of relief when her feet touched the platform; her
one regret was that she was not leaving London further away than the
hundred miles which separated Melkbridge from the metropolis. It
seemed to her as if the great city were exclusively peopled with Mr.
Orgles', Mrs Hamiltons, Miss Ewers, and their like. Ignorant of
London's kindness, she had only thought for its wickedness. With the
exception of one incident, she had resolved to forget as much as
possible of her existence since she had left Brandenburg College;
also, to see what happiness she could wrest from life in the
capacity of clerk in the Melkbridge boot manufactory, a position she
owed to her long delayed appeal to Mr Devitt for employment. The one
incident that she cared to dwell upon was her meeting with Windebank
and the kindly concern he had exhibited in her welfare. The morning
following upon her encounter with him, she had long debated, without
arriving at any conclusion, whether she had done well, or otherwise,
in leaving him as she had done. As the days passed, if things seemed
inclined to go happily with her, she was glad that she had put an
end to their budding friendship, to regret her behaviour when vexed
by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.



Her few hours' acquaintance with Windebank had ruffled the surface
of the deep, unexplored waters of the girl's passion, which, rightly
or wrongly, caused her to surrender her personal preferences and to
regard the matter entirely from the man's point of view. This self-
abasement was, largely, the result of the girl's natural instincts
where her affections were concerned; these had been reinforced by
the sentimental pabulum which enters so much into the fiction that