"LIKE SHIPS THAT PASS IN THE NIGHT."
"The situation that has not its Duty, its Ideal, was never yet occupied by man. Yes, here in this miserable, despicable actual wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere is thy Ideal. Work it out therefore. The Ideal is in thyself, the impediment too is in thyself."
Carlyle.
"Something there was in her life incomplete, imperfect, unfinished."
Longfellow.
One evening, about a week later, Thorold Chaytor walked quickly over the Dereham bridge on his way from the station. His day, as usual, had been spent in his dingy chambers in Lincoln's Inn; he had worked hard, and felt unusually weary, and the damp chilliness of the mists rising from the river made him shiver and button up his coat more closely.
A slight mizzling rain was now falling; the pavements were wet and greasy; the gas lights on the towing path seemed to waver and then flare up with windy flickers; the black hulls of the boats and barges moored to the shore loomed through the mist like vast monsters weltering in the mud; and the grey river flowing under the bridges washed silently against the piers in the darkness.
Mr. Chaytor's chambers in Lincoln's Inn were high up, and very small and inconvenient—"Chaytor's sky parlour," some of his friends called it, for in reality it consisted of only one room and a good-sized cupboard; but the view of chimney-pots from the window was certainly unique. To be sure, it was somewhat cold in winter, and at times the chimney was given to smoking, and in summer it certainly resembled the Black Hole in Calcutta; but these were trifles to be borne stoically, if not cheerfully.
In this den Thorold Chaytor did most of his literary work, and waited for briefs; nor did he wait wholly in vain.
Althea had spoken of him as a poor man, and this opinion was shared by many others. When old friends of the family, who had visited at the old Manor House, came down to the dull, shabby-looking house in High Street, where Thorold and his sister lived, they used to sigh and shrug their shoulders.
"It was grievous," they would say. "No wonder poor Joanna looked so old and careworn! And they only kept one servant, too;" and then they would talk, under their breath, of the wasteful extravagance at the old Manor House, and then of that racing establishment at Newmarket, to which the Chaytor fortunes had been sacrificed.
But if Thorold and Joanna practised rigid economy, and only kept one servant, it was because they stinted themselves of their own free-will.