able pensioner.'

'Or is it not, that you have been living the gentleman out there, with
just a holiday title to it?'

Gower was hit by his father's thrust. 'I shall feel myself a pieman's
chuckpenny as long as I'm unproductive, now I 've come back and have to
own to a home,' he said.

Tea brought in by Mrs. Mary Jones rather brightened him until he
considered that the enlivenment was due to a purchase by money, of which
he was incapable, and he rejected it, like an honourable man.
Simultaneously, the state of depression threw critic shades on a prized
sentence or two among his recent confections. It was rejected for the
best of reasons and the most discomforting: because it racked our
English; signifying, that he had not yet learnt the right use of his
weapons.

He was in this wrestle, under a placid demeanour, for several days,
hearing the shouts of Whitechapel Kit's victory, and hearing of Sarah
Winch's anxiety on account of her sister Madge; unaffected by sounds of
joy or grief, in his effort to produce a supple English, with Baden's
Madonna for sole illumination of his darkness. To her, to the illimitable
gold-mist of perspective and the innumerable images the thought of her
painted for him, he owed the lift which withdrew him from contemplation
of himself in a very disturbing stagnant pool of the wastes; wherein
often will strenuous youth, grown faint, behold a face beneath a scroll
inscribed Impostor. All whose aim was high have spied into that pool, and
have seen the face. His glorious lady would not let it haunt him.

The spell she cast had likewise power to raise him clean out of a
neighbourhood hinting Erebus to the young man with thirst for air,
solitudes, and colour. Scarce imaginable as she was, she reigned here, in
the idea of her, more fixedly than where she had been visible; as it
were, by right of her being celestially removed from the dismal place. He
was at the same time not insensible to his father's contented
ministrations among these homes of squalor; they pricked the curiosity,
which was in the youthful philosopher a form of admiration. For his
father, like all Welshmen, loved the mountains. Yet here he lived,
exhorting, ministering, aiding, supported up to high good cheer by some,
it seemed, superhuman backbone of uprightness;--his religious faith?
Well, if so, the thing might be studied. But things of the frozen senses,
lean and hueless things, were as repellent to Gower's imagination as h