He had a definite and absorbing aim before him. Felix meant—not only meant, but was resolutely determined—to get on in life. He had no idea of resting content with his present position. Getting on would mean hard work: and he was willing to work hard. He intended to succeed: to climb from step to step, to win confidence and approval, to leave the stationer's shop in his rear, to make money, to secure a home for his sisters. So far as all this went, it was right. The aim was a commendable aim in itself: only it lacked something. He did not look up for Divine Blessing on his purpose. He did not whisper, "If God will."
Except for this lack, the boy meant well. A certain amount of egoism might mingle with his dreams: yet a silver thread of unselfishness ran through them also. Cecilia's devotion to him in the past, he accepted, as boys do accept such devotion, merely as a matter of course and no more than his due. Nevertheless, he realised that his turn had come, and he longed to work for her: and when the thought came up of Lettice's pale face and sad eyes, his own eyes grew dim. Felix was glad of the darkness, that nobody might see.
"Lettice shall always be mine, never Dr. Bryant's," he declared to himself. Then he wondered, as he had wondered twenty times that day, how soon a letter would arrive. Surely Lettice might have written the day after their arrival.
Felix had hardly yet begun to dream of another kind of love, a closer tie than that of sister and brother. Many boys begin long before they reach his age: but he was young for his years, a thorough home-lad, and he had mixed little in society of any kind.
Cecilia's proud reticence had come in the way here of what might have been for his advantage. He had formed two or three friendships in his school-days, permitted though not encouraged by her: but the friends so made had recently left Brighton, for India and the Colonies. Felix was left stranded, without a single real friend in all Brighton, at the moment when he most needed friends, and with few acquaintances.
He was almost as slow as Cecilia herself in "taking to" strangers. There were two or three other young fellows at the stationer's, beside one rather older man named Andrews, and Mr. Thompson himself, Felix' employer. Felix was respectful to Mr. Thompson, submissive to Andrews, and on the alert to do his work well: but personally, he cared for none of them, perhaps because he would not care, would not take the trouble to know any of them sufficiently well for indifference to pass into liking. After Cecilia's style, he held aloof, and thereby made himself disliked. A man who would have friends must "show himself friendly."
"I shall not live this sort of life always. I am made for something better," he would say to himself, when he found that his own repellent bearing was inducing the same from others. He forgot that whether or no some other mode of life might be "better," according to his views, yet so long as he did live "this sort of life," he owed courtesy and kindness to those about him. Or perhaps it was not so much that he forgot, as that he did not know. Cecilia's training, moral and religious, of this dearly loved young brother had been defective.
"I am made for something better," Felix declared again, late that Saturday afternoon, as he left the Parade and strode through the dark streets towards his now lonely home. "Something will turn up, sooner or later. I will get on! I'll let them know that I'm up to work, and then, when an opening comes—"
"How do you do?" a voice said, and Felix found himself, under the lamplight, face to face with Mr. Kelly.
The clergyman looked younger, more frail, and more at his ease, than when visiting Cecilia Anderson. Felix paused less reluctantly than he would have paused a week earlier. In his present loneliness, a friendly word was not to be counted worthless.