, the pianoforte
dealer in Market Square, Turnhill, and captious old Mrs. Toft formed
part of the new household. At thirty-four Clarice possessed a little
girl and two little boys, twins. Sillitoe was a money-maker, and she no
longer gave lessons.

Happy? Perhaps not unhappy.

* * * * *

A LETTER HOME[2]

[2] Written in 1893.

I

Rain was falling--it had fallen steadily through the night--but the sky
showed promise of fairer weather. As the first streaks of dawn appeared,
the wind died away, and the young leaves on the trees were almost
silent. The birds were insistently clamorous, vociferating times without
number that it was a healthy spring morning and good to be alive.

A little, bedraggled crowd stood before the park gates, awaiting the
hour named on the notice board when they would be admitted to such
lodging and shelter as iron seats and overspreading branches might
afford. A weary, patient-eyed, dogged crowd--a dozen men, a boy of
thirteen, and a couple of women, both past middle age--which had been
gathering slowly since five o'clock. The boy appeared to be the least
uncomfortable. His feet were bare, but he had slept well in an area in
Grosvenor Place, and was not very damp yet. The women had nodded on many
doorsteps, and were soaked. They stood apart from the men, who seemed
unconscious of their existence. The men were exactly such as one would
have expected to find there--beery and restless as to the eyes, quaintly
shod, and with nondescript greenish clothes which for the most part bore
traces of the yoke of the sandwich board. Only one amongst them was
different.

He was young, and his cap, and manner of wearing it, gave sign of the
sea. His face showed the rough outlines of his history. Yet it was a
transparently honest face, very pale, but still boyish and fresh enough
to make one wonder by what rapid descent he had reached his present
level. Perhaps the receding chin, the heavy, pouting lower lip, and the
ceaselessly twitching mouth offered a key to the problem.

'Say, Darkey!' he said.

'Well?'

'How much longer?'

'Can't ye see the clock? It's staring ye in the face.'

'No. Something queer's come over my eyes.'

Darkey was a short, sturdy man, who kept his head down and his hands
deep in his pockets. The raindrops clinging to the rim of an ancient hat
fell every now and then into his gray beard, which presented a drowned
appearance. He was a