ssing on these broad pavements. At times he would shrink into a
shadowed corner, and peer thence at those who went by under the
gaslight. When he moved forward, it was with the uneasy gait of one who
shuns observation; you would have thought, perchance, that he watched
an opportunity of begging and was shamefaced: it happened now and then
that he was regarded suspiciously. A rough-looking man, with grizzled
beard, with eyes generally bloodshot, his shoulders stooping--naturally
the miserable are always suspected where law is conscious of its
injustice.

Two years ago he was beset for a time with the same restlessness, and
took night-walks in the same directions; the habit wore away, however.
Now it possessed him even more strongly. Between ten and eleven
o'clock, when the children were in bed, he fell into abstraction, and
presently, with an unexpected movement, looked up as if some one had
spoken to him--just the look of one who hears a familiar voice; then he
sighed, and took his hat and went forth. It happened sometimes when he
was sitting with his friends Mr. and Mrs. Eagles; in that case he would
make some kind of excuse. The couple suspected that his business would
take him to the public-house, but John never came back with a sign
about him of having drunk; of that failing he had broken himself. He
went cautiously down the atone stairs, averting his face if anyone met
him; then by cross-ways he reached Gray's Inn Road, and so westwards.

He had a well-ordered home, and his children were about him, but these
things did not compensate him for the greatest loss his life had
suffered. The children, in truth, had no very strong hold upon his
affections. Sometimes, when Amy sat and talked to him, he showed a
growing nervousness, an impatience, and at length turned away from her
as if to occupy himself in some manner. The voice was not that which
had ever power to soothe him when it spoke playfully. Memory brought
back the tones which had been so dear to him, and at times something
more than memory; he seemed really to hear them, as if from a distance.
And then it was that he went out to wander in the streets.

Of Bob in the meantime he saw scarcely anything. That young man
presented himself one Sunday shortly after his father had become
settled in the new home, but practically he was a stranger. John and he
had no interests in common; there even existed a slight antipathy on
the father's part of late years. Strangely