Thenceforward Ada was to him an unnoticeable item in the cosmos.
One hopeless month succeeded another, until a cloud seemed to close round Paul's brain, rendering him automatic in his actions, merely animal in his half-satisfied appetites.

Fines and curses were his portion at the factory; curses and beatings--deserved if Justice held a hurried scale at home.

Paul, who had read of suicide in The Bludston Herald, turned his thoughts morbidly to death.

But his dramatic imagination always carried him beyond' his own demise to the scene in the household when his waxlike corpse should be discovered dangling from a rope fixed to the hook in the kitchen ceiling.

He posed cadaverous before a shocked Budge Street, before a conscience-stricken factory; and he wept on his sack bed in the scullery because the prince and the princess, his august parents, would never know that he had died.