his fellows. But the instinct to
wonder at the night was not to be thus appeased. At first he had lived
under the care of Mr. Failing the only person to whom his mother spoke
freely, the only person who had treated her neither as a criminal nor as
a pioneer. In their rare but intimate conversations she had asked him to
educate her son. "I will teach him Latin," he answered. "The rest such
a boy must remember." Latin, at all events, was a failure: who could
attend to Virgil when the sound of the thresher arose, and you knew
that the stack was decreasing and that rats rushed more plentifully each
moment to their doom? But he was fond of Mr. Failing, and cried when he
died. Mrs. Elliot, a pleasant woman, died soon after.

There was something fatal in the order of these deaths. Mr. Failing had
made no provision for the boy in his will: his wife had promised to
see to this. Then came Mr. Elliot's death, and, before the new home
was created, the sudden death of Mrs. Elliot. She also left Stephen no
money: she had none to leave. Chance threw him into the power of Mrs.
Failing. "Let things go on as they are," she thought. "I will take care
of this pretty little boy, and the ugly little boy can live with the
Silts. After my death--well, the papers will be found after my death,
and they can meet then. I like the idea of their mutual ignorance. It is
amusing."

He was then twelve. With a few brief intervals of school, he lived in
Wiltshire until he was driven out. Life had two distinct sides--the
drawing-room and the other. In the drawing-room people talked a good
deal, laughing as they talked. Being clever, they did not care for
animals: one man had never seen a hedgehog. In the other life people
talked and laughed separately, or even did neither. On the whole, in
spite of the wet and gamekeepers, this life was preferable. He knew
where he was. He glanced at the boy, or later at the man, and behaved
accordingly. There was no law--the policeman was negligible. Nothing
bound him but his own word, and he gave that sparingly.

It is impossible to be romantic when you have your heart's desire, and
such a boy disappointed Mrs. Failing greatly. His parents had met for
one brief embrace, had found one little interval between the power of
the rulers of this world and the power of death. He was the child of
poetry and of rebellion, and poetry should run in his veins. But he
lived too near the things he loved to seem poetical. Parted from