The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch

by Talbot Baines Reed

Of course Tom sat down and answered this letter at once, much reproaching himself for his past neglect.

With the vision of Charlie before his eyes, and with the sound of his voice again in his ears, all his old resolutions and impulses returned that morning. He worked hard, and flung the trashy novel, over which he had been wasting his time the day before, into the fire; he went off to lectures with something like his old eagerness, and discharged his duties in the wards with interest and thoroughness; he refused to allow his mind to be distracted by the proceedings of his fellow-students, and he resolved to spend that very evening at Mr Newcome’s.

Tom Drift would probably have laughed at the idea that this sudden change was due entirely to Charlie’s letter. To him it seemed like a spontaneous reassertion of its natural self by his mind, and a matter for such self-congratulation and satisfaction, that it at once covered the multitude of past omissions.

Indeed, Tom felt very virtuous as he returned that afternoon to his lodgings; and so felt no need to look away from self to Him who alone can keep us from falling.

He read Charlie’s letter over again, and smiled at the idea of his getting up mathematics in his spare time.

“He’s not the sort of fellow to stick to work of that sort,” said Tom to himself, secretly comparing his own remarkable powers of application with those of his Randlebury friend.

Then he sat down, and more than ever admiring and wondering at his own greediness for hard work, read till it was time to start for Mr Newcome’s.

It was a good long way, but being a fine evening, Tom determined to walk. He felt that after his work the fresh air would do him good, and besides, as he was in plenty of time, he could indulge himself in that very cheap and harmless luxury, an inspection of the shop windows as he went along. He therefore selected a longer and more crowded route than perhaps he need have done, and certainly, as far as the shops went, was rewarded for his pains.

However, Tom seemed to me to have as much interest in watching the people who passed to and fro as in the shops. He amused himself by wondering where this one was going and what that one was doing. With his usual tendency, he chose to imagine they were all bent on mischief or folly, and because they happened to be in a certain street, and because in that street he had frequently heard some of his fellow-students speak of a low theatre, he jumped to the conclusion that every one he saw was bound for this place. Something impelled him to go himself and take an exterior survey of this mysterious and much-spoken-of building. He found it; and, as he expected, he found people thronging in, though not in the numbers he had anticipated. He stood and watched them for some time, and wondered what they were going to see.

He went up and read the playbill. He read the name of the play, the titles of its acts, and the names of its actors. He wondered if the man who just then drove up in a hansom was one of the heroes of the piece, or whether he was one of the performers in the farce announced to follow the play. Still the people streamed in. There was no one he knew, and no one knew him.