The morning was bright and fine, and the eastern sky glowed pink,
and was fretted with little golden clouds.  In the road that runs from
the top of Putney Hill to Wimbledon was a number of poor vestiges of
the panic torrent that must have poured Londonward on the Sunday night
after the fighting began.  There was a little two-wheeled cart
inscribed with the name of Thomas Lobb, Greengrocer, New Malden, with
a smashed wheel and an abandoned tin trunk; there was a straw hat
trampled into the now hardened mud, and at the top of West Hill a lot
of blood-stained glass about the overturned water trough.  My
movements were languid, my plans of the vaguest.  I had an idea of
going to Leatherhead, though I knew that there I had the poorest
chance of finding my wife.  Certainly, unless death had overtaken them
suddenly, my cousins and she would have fled thence; but it seemed to
me I might find or learn there whither the Surrey people had fled.  I
knew I wanted to find my wife, that my heart ached for her and the
world of men, but I had no clear idea how the finding might be done.  I
was also sharply aware now of my intense loneliness.  From the corner
I went, under cover of a thicket of trees and bushes, to the edge of
Wimbledon Common, stretching wide and far.