book!'

'I really can't see why you shouldn't. Just do a certain number of pages
every day. Good or bad, never mind; let the pages be finished. Now you
have got two chapters--'

'No; that won't do. I must think of a better subject.'

Amy made a gesture of impatience.

'There you are! What does the subject matter? Get this book finished and
sold, and then do something better next time.'

'Give me to-night, just to think. Perhaps one of the old stories I have
thrown aside will come back in a clearer light. I'll go out for an hour;
you don't mind being left alone?'

'You mustn't think of such trifles as that.'

'But nothing that concerns you in the slightest way is a trifle to
me--nothing! I can't bear that you should forget that. Have patience
with me, darling, a little longer.'

He knelt by her, and looked up into her face.

'Say only one or two kind words--like you used to!'

She passed her hand lightly over his hair, and murmured something with a
faint smile.

Then Reardon took his hat and stick and descended the eight flights
of stone steps, and walked in the darkness round the outer circle
of Regent's Park, racking his fagged brain in a hopeless search for
characters, situations, motives.

CHAPTER V. THE WAY HITHER

Even in mid-rapture of his marriage month he had foreseen this
possibility; but fate had hitherto rescued him in sudden ways when he
was on the brink of self-abandonment, and it was hard to imagine that
this culmination of triumphant joy could be a preface to base miseries.

He was the son of a man who had followed many different pursuits, and
in none had done much more than earn a livelihood. At the age of
forty--when Edwin, his only child, was ten years old--Mr Reardon
established himself in the town of Hereford as a photographer, and there
he abode until his death, nine years after, occasionally risking some
speculation not inconsistent with the photographic business, but always
with the result of losing the little capital he ventured. Mrs Reardon
died when Edwin had reached his fifteenth year. In breeding and
education she was superior to her husband, to whom, moreover, she had
brought something between four and five hundred pounds; her temper was
passionate in both senses of the word, and the marriage could hardly be
called a happy one, though it was never disturbed by serious discord.
The photographer was a man of whims and idealisms; his wife had a
strong vein of worldly ambi