On the whole, and most of the time, he was a sad spectacle; he looked so hopelessly idle.

If he was not querulous and bitter, it was because he had taken an extraordinary vow not to be; a vow heroic, for him, a vow which those who knew him well had the tenderness to appreciate.

Talking with him was like skating on thin ice, and his companions had a constant mental vision of spots designated "dangerous." This was a difficult time for Rowland; he said to himself that he would endure it to the end, but that it must be his last adventure of the kind.

Mrs.Hudson divided her time between looking askance at her son, with her hands tightly clasped about her pocket-handkerchief, as if she were wringing it dry of the last hour's tears, and turning her eyes much more directly upon Rowland, in the mutest, the feeblest, the most intolerable reproachfulness.

She never phrased her accusations, but he felt that in the unillumined void of the poor lady's mind they loomed up like vaguely-outlined monsters.