She had a fear that his operations might at length become offensive to her taste, might stray from the line of her own ambitions; but she saw good reason to await developments in silence; and to postpone deviating from Ned’s wishes, until they should cease to forward hers.

Upon her landing at Bristol, and looking around with interest at the shipping which reminded her of New York but to emphasise her feeling of exile therefrom, her thrilling sense of being at last in the Old World, abated her heaviness at leaving the ship which seemed the one remaining tie with her former life.  If ever a woman felt herself to be entering upon life anew, and realised a necessity of blotting the past from memory, it was she; and well it was that the novelty of her surroundings, the sense of treading the soil whereon she had so long pined to set foot, aided her resolution to banish from her mind all that lay behind her.

The time-worn, weather-beaten aspect of the town, its old streets thronged with people of whom she was not known to a soul, would have made her disconsolate, had she not forced herself to contemplate with interest the omnipresent antiquity, to her American eyes so new.  And so, as she had heroically endured seasickness, she now fought bravely against homesickness; and, in the end, as nearly conquered it as one ever does.

’Twas a cold ride by stage-coach to London, at that season; there were few travellers in the coach, and those few were ill-natured with discomfort, staring fiercely at the two strangers—­whose strangeness they instantly detected by some unconscious process—­as if the pair were responsible for the severe February weather, or guilty of some unknown crime.  At the inns where they stopped, for meals and overnight, they were subjected to a protracted gazing on the part of all who saw them—­an inspection seemingly resentful or disapproving, but indeed only curious.  It irritated Madge, who asked Ned what the cause might be.

“Tut!  Don’t mind it,” said he. “’Tis the way of the English, everywhere but in London.  They stare at strangers as if they was in danger of being insulted by ’em, or having their pockets picked by ’em, or at best as if they was looking at some remarkable animal; but they mean no harm by it.”

“How can they see we are strangers?” she queried.  “We’re dressed like them.”

“God knows!  Perhaps because we look more cheerful than they do, and have a brisker way, and laugh easier,” conjectured Ned.  “But you’ll feel more at home in London.”

By the time she arrived in London, having slept in a different bed each night after landing, and eaten at so many different inns each day, Madge felt as if she had been a long while in England.[8] She came to the town thus as to a haven of rest; and though she was still gazed at for her beauty, it was not in that ceaseless and mistrustful way in which she had been scrutinised from top to toe in the country; moreover, the names of many of the streets and localities were familiar to her, and in her thoughts she had already visited them:  for these reasons, which were more than Ned had taken account of, she did indeed feel somewhat at home in London, as he had predicted.