A STORY WITHOUT A NAME.[24]
WRITTEN FOR THE INTERNATIONAL MONTHLY MAGAZINE,
BY G. P. R. JAMES, ESQ.
Continued from Page 44.
CHAPTER VI.
Reader, can you go back for twenty years? You do it every day. You say, "Twenty years ago I was a boy—twenty years ago I was a youth—twenty years ago I played at peg-top and at marbles—twenty years ago I wooed—was loved—I sinned—I suffered!" What is there in twenty years that should keep us from going back over them? You go on so fast, so smoothly, so easily on the forward course—why not in retrogression? But let me tell you: it makes a very great difference whether Hope or Memory drives the coach.
But let us see what we can do. Twenty years before the period at which the last chapter broke off, Philip Hastings, now a father of a girl of fifteen, was a lad standing by the side of his brother's grave. Twenty years ago Sir John Hastings was the living lord of these fine lands and broad estates. Twenty years ago he passed, from the mouth of the vault in which he had laid the clay of the first-born, into the open splendor of the day, and felt sorrow's desolation in the sunshine. Twenty years ago, he had been confronted on the church-yard path by a tall old woman, and challenged with words high and stern, to do her right in regard to a paltry rood or two of land. Twenty years ago he had given her a harsh, cold answer, and treated her menaces with impatient scorn.
Do you remember her, reader? Well, if you do, that brings us to the point I sought to reach in the dull flat expanse of the far past; and we can stand and look around us for awhile.