CHAPTER X.
AGAIN ON FOOT--THE GIRLS THAT NEVER CAN BE MINE Next morning I was afoot early, bent on my quest in right good earnest; for I had a remorseful feeling that I had not been sufficiently diligent the day before, had spent too much time in dreaming and moralising, in which opinion I am afraid the reader will agree.
So I was up and out of the town while as yet most of the inhabitants were in the throes of getting up.

Somewhere too SHE, the Golden One, the White Woman, was drowsily tossing the night-clothes from her limbs and rubbing her sleepy eyes.

William Morris's lovely song came into my mind,-- 'And midst them all, perchance, my love Is waking, and doth gently move And stretch her soft arms out to me, Forgetting thousand leagues of sea." Perhaps she was in the very town I was leaving behind.

Perhaps we had slept within a few houses of each other.

Who could tell?
Looking back at the old town, with its one steep street climbing the white face of the chalk hill, I remembered what wonderful exotic women Thomas Hardy had found eating their hearts out behind the windows of dull country high streets, through which hung waving no banners of romance, outwardly as unpromising of adventure as the windows of the town I had left.