He moans a little as he walks. There is something in life that he has missed, and to its discovery he can bring no more than this—that it rests not in violent disregard of what happens to him or what he does, for that he has proved empty; nor rests in the ease that, by communication with London, might be his, for that inflicts return to the old self, hatred and fear of whom had driven him away. Where then? And then it is he moans. His mind presents him none but these alternatives; his mind, when miserably he rejects them, threateningly turns them upon him in forms of fear. "Well, you have got to live," his mind threatens him. "To-morrow you shall perhaps be turned out from this post at the school. You will have to face anew some means of life; you will have to suffer what has to be suffered in that part; face men and submit to their treatment of such as you, or face them and find fierceness sufficient to defy them."
"No, no!" he cries. "No, no!" He fears his powers of endurance, fears that beneath those trials he will be driven back to where is turned upon him the other threat. "Well, you must go back," his thoughts threaten him. "Money and comfort await you in London for your asking. You must go back to what you were. Live at ease in seclusion, if you will; ah, with your old way of life to tell you hourly that now it has you chained—that now you have tried escape, proved it impossible, and never again can escape it!"
He cries aloud: "No, no!" He moans for his abject hopelessness. He trembles for his fears at these his threats. Under his misery he wanders away from the direction of the little plumber's shop, hating to enter it and to its brightness expose his suffering; under his fears he hastens to it, clinging to this present occupation lest, losing it, one of the threats that threaten him unsheaths its sword upon him.
VI
When, by these vacillations, he is late for the supper hour, Essie will be at the shop door watching for him.
"Well, aren't you half late, though!" cries Essie. "I was jus' goin' to dish up. Oh, you lodgers, you know, you're fair cautions!"
"I was kept late," he says.
"Well, you weren't half walking slow when you come round the corner, though." She sees his face more clearly in the light of the shop and she says: "Oh, dear, you don't look half tired! My steak-and-kidney pudding, that's what you want! Here he is, Dad! Get his slippers, Mother? That old Whiskyquick's been fair tiring him out!"
She runs to the kitchen and in a minute calls out: "All ready? Oh, it's cooked a fair treat!" She bears in the steaming steak-and-kidney pudding, sets it on the table, but stops while above the bubbling crust she poises her knife and watches it with her little twitches of her lips and with her sparkling eyes.
"Come, Essie," says Mrs. Bickers.