have used one for
her curl-papers. He noticed just then, for the first time in his life,
that the parlour of his old home was very small; the ceiling was so low
that he found himself almost choking for breath when he looked up.

Dora and her mother were clearing away the tea-dishes, and Henry went
upstairs to the bedroom where he would sleep with his father. The old
nest had altered in a hundred ways, although none but Henry knew that.
He had once been a bird of the brood here, but he had taken wings away,
and to return for a fortnight once in two years was only to realise how
far his wings had carried him. Henry had been born here, the people
that he loved the best of all were still living here in the old
home--his old home. Yet it could never be anything but his _old_ home
now. We talk about returning home; but really we never do so. Once we
leave the home of our boyhood and youth, we never return again. It is
seldom we wish to go back to the old life; and when the wish is there,
Fate is usually against its fulfilment.

Henry Charles had certainly altered in a bewildering variety of ways
since we first made his acquaintance. Then a tall, sallow youth of
sixteen, ungainly in limb and not well-featured, his nose unshapely, his
mouth too large, but a pair of dark eyes gleaming with spirit to light
up the homeliness of the face. Now, a man--oh, the few short years, the
tiny bridge across the chasm, the bridge we never pass again!--a man:
tall as a dragoon, leggy, it is true, as the shrewd eye of his father
had judged; but no longer thin to veritable lantern jaws, rather a
promise of ample fleshing, and a nose that had sharpened itself into an
organ not uncomely of outline. This changing of the nose is one of the
most curious of our few tadpole resemblances. His mouth might still be
large, but a glossy moustache hides many an anti-Cupid pair of lips,
which a few passes of the razor would unmask to set the dear boy flying.
Henry's hair was raven black and ample--perilously near to disaster for
a hero. But we must have the truth in this narrative, cost what it may.

As he stood in the bedroom, brushing his hair and bending carefully to
avoid knocking his head against the ceiling, which sloped steeply to the
dormer window, where stood the looking-glass on its old mahogany table
with the white linen cover, Henry presented the picture of a wholesome
young Englishman, proud of brain rather than muscle, and differing
therein fr