“ That wouldn’t have happened,” he thought, “if I’d left it where it was.”

The sight of the butcher’s cart made him think of Miss Gault. “I wonder what that woman feels,” he said to himself, “now Mattie is to be married instead of going to a Home in Taunton? Does she realize the amount of old bitterness that underlies her meddling? But she does think herself into the nerves of animals in slaughterhouses just as I do into the nerves of leaves on pavements.”