At a little
after ten o'clock tonight John Hewett and the children were in bed;
he too, weary in mind and body, would gladly have gone upstairs, but
he lingered from one five minutes to the next, his heart sinking at
the certainty that he would find Clara in sleepless misery which he
had no power to allay.
Round the walls of the parlour were hung his own drawings, which
used to conceal the bareness of his lodging in Tysoe Street. It was
three years since he had touched a pencil; the last time having been
when he made holiday with Michael Snowdon and Jane at the farm-house
by Danbury Hill. The impulse would never come again. It was
associated with happiness, with hope; and What had his life to do
with one or the other? Could he have effected the change without the
necessity of explaining it, he would gladly have put those drawings
out of sight. Whenever, as now, he consciously regarded them, they
plucked painfully at his heart-strings, and threatened to make him a
coward.
None of that! He had his work to do, happiness or no happiness, and
by all the virtue of manhood he would not fail in it--as far as
success or failure was a question of his own resolve.
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