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 certain that, for good or for bad, she was very like the rest of her family.

Sitting in the corner of a third-class railway carriage, on the afternoon of the following day, Ralph made several inquiries of a commercial traveller in the opposite corner. They centred round a village called Lampsher, not three miles, he understood, from Lincoln; was there a big house in Lampsher, he asked, inhabited by a gentleman of the name of Otway?

The traveller knew nothing, but rolled the name of Otway on his tongue, reflectively, and the sound of it gratified Ralph amazingly. It gave him an excuse to take a letter from his pocket in order to verify the address.

“Stogdon House, Lampsher, Lincoln,” he read out.

“You'll find somebody to direct you at Lincoln,” said the man; and Ralph had to confess that he was not bound there this very evening.

“I’ve got to walk over from Disham,” he said, and in the heart of him could not help marvelling at the pleasure which he derived from making a bagman in a train believe what he himself did not believe. For the letter, though signed by Katharine’s father, contained no invitation or warrant for thinking that Katharine herself was there; the only fact it disclosed was that for a fortnight this address would be Mr. Hilbery’s address. But when he looked out of the window, it was of her he thought; she, too, had seen these grey fields, and, perhaps, she was there where the trees ran up a slope, and one yellow light shone now, and then went out again, at the foot of the hill. The light shone in the windows of an old grey house, he thought. He lay back in his corner and forgot the commercial traveller altogether. The process of visualizing Katharine stopped short at the old grey manor-house; instinct warned him that if he went much further with this process reality would soon force itself in; he could not altogether neglect the figure of William Rodney.