It was a mean advantage to have taken over Miss, but he was
glad they had taken it, for it made him realise more fully than ever
that his one chance lay in separating himself completely from them.
The morning was grey, and the first signs of winter fog were
beginning to show themselves, for it was now the 30th of September.
Ernest wore the clothes in which he had entered prison, and was
therefore dressed as a clergyman. No one who looked at him would
have seen any difference between his present appearance and his
appearance six months previously; indeed, as he walked slowly
through the dingy crowded lane called Eyre Street Hill (which he
well knew, for he had clerical friends in that neighbourhood), the
months he had passed in prison seemed to drop out of his life, and
so powerfully did association carry him away that, finding himself
in his old dress and in his old surroundings, he felt dragged back
into his old self- as though his six months of prison life had been
a dream from which he was now waking to take things up as he had
left them. This was the effect of unchanged surroundings upon the
unchanged part of him. But there was a changed part, and the effect of
unchanged surroundings upon this was to make everything seem almost as
strange as though he had never had any life but his prison one, and
was now born into a new world.
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