even younger than I had ever seen him look before.
By slow degrees only, it came home to me, the knowledge that he was gone
away from us. For days--for weeks, I would hear his step behind me in
the street, his voice calling to me, see his face among the crowds,
and hastening to meet him, stand bewildered because it had mysteriously
disappeared. But at first I felt no pain whatever.

To my mother it was but a short parting. Into her placid faith had never
fallen fear nor doubt. He was waiting for her. In God's good time they
would meet again. What need of sorrow! Without him the days passed
slowly: the house must ever be a little dull when the good man's away.
But that was all. So my mother would speak of him always--of his dear,
kind ways, of his oddities and follies we loved so to recall, not
through tears, but smiles, thinking of him not as of one belonging to
the past, but as of one beckoning to her from the future.

We lived on still in the old house though ever planning to move, for
the great brick monster had crept closer round about us year by year,
devouring in his progress all things fair. Field and garden, tree and
cottage, time-mellowed house suggesting story, kind hedgerow hiding
hideousness beyond--the few spots yet in that doomed land lingering to
remind one of the sunshine, one by one had he scrunched them between his
ugly teeth. A world apart, this east end of London, this ghetto of the
poor for ever growing, dreariness added year by year to dreariness,
hopelessness stretching ever farther its long, shrivelled arms, these
endless rows of reeking cells where London herds her slaves. Often of a
misty afternoon when we knew that without this city of the dead life was
stirring in the sunshine, we would fare forth to house-hunt in
pleasant suburbs, now themselves added to the weary catacomb of narrow
streets--to Highgate, then a tiny town connected by a coach with leafy
Holloway; to Hampstead with its rows of ancient red-brick houses, from
whose wind-blown heath one saw beyond the woods and farms, far London's
domes and spires, to Wood Green among the pastures, where smock-coated
labourers discussed their politics and ale beneath wide-spreading elms;
to Hornsey, then a village consisting of an ivy-covered church and one
grass-bordered way. But though we often saw "the very thing for us" and
would discuss its possibilities from every point of view and find them
good, we yet delayed.

"We must think it over,