A man who had strength for solitude; yet, I think, with all his strength, his mother could not have borne to look back from the dead that day, to see her boy so utterly alone.

The day was the crisis of his life, looked forward to for years; he held in his hand a sure passport to fortune.

Yet he thrust the hour off, perversely, trifling with idle fancies, pushing from him the one question which all the years past and to come had left for this day to decide.
Some such idle fancy it may have been that made the man turn from the usual way down a narrow passage into which opened doors from small offices.

Margret Howth, he had learned to-day, was in the first one.
He hesitated before he did it, his sallow face turning a trifle paler; then he went on in his hard, grave way, wondering dimly if she remembered his step, if she cared to see him now.

She used to know it,--she was the only one in the world who ever had cared to know it,--silly child! Doubtless she was wiser now.