XLI. LABORIOUS DAYS.
XLII. A HEAVIER FOOTFALL.
XLIII. STILL ANOTHER CALLER.
XLIV. THE END OF A BEGINNING.
YOUNG LIVES
CHAPTER I
HARD YOUNG HEARTS
Behind the Venetian blinds of a respectable middle-class,
fifty-pound-a-year, "semi-detached," "family" house, in a respectable
middle-class road of the little north-county town of Sidon, midway
between the trees of wealth upon the hill, and the business quarters
that ended in squalor on the bank of the broad and busy river,--a house
boasting a few shabby trees of its own, in its damp little rockeried
slips of front and back gardens,--on a May evening some ten or twelve
years ago, a momentous crisis of contrasts had been reached.
The house was still as for a battle. It was holding its breath to hear
what was going on in the front parlour, the door of which seemed to wear
an expression of being more than usually closed. A mournful half-light
fell through a little stained-glass vestibule into a hat-racked hall, on
the walls of which hung several pictures of those great steamships known
as "Atlantic liners" in big gilt frames--pictures of a significance
presently to be noted.
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