old acquaintance?'

Monica answered with all necessary detail, and went on to mention the
proposal that had been made to her. The hearer reflected, and put
further questions. Unwilling to speak of the little capital she
possessed, Monica told him that her sisters might perhaps help her to
live whilst she was learning a new occupation. But Widdowson had become
abstracted; he ceased pulling, crossed his arms on the oars, and
watched other boats that were near. Two deep wrinkles, rippling in
their course, had formed across his forehead, and his eyes widened in a
gaze of complete abstraction at the farther shore.

'Yes,' fell from him at length, as though in continuation of something
he had been saying, 'I began to earn my bread when I was fourteen. My
father was an auctioneer at Brighton. A few years after his marriage he
had a bad illness, which left him completely deaf. His partnership with
another man was dissolved, and as things went worse and worse with him,
my mother started a lodging-house, which somehow supported us for a
long time. She was a sensible, good, and brave woman. I'm afraid my
father had a good many faults that made her life hard. He was of a
violent temper, and of course the deafness didn't improve it. Well, one
day a cab knocked him down in the King's Road, and from that injury,
though not until a year after, he died. There were only two children; I
was the elder. My mother couldn't keep me at school very long, so, at
fourteen, I was sent into the office of the man who had been my
father's partner, to serve him and learn the business. I did serve him
for years, and for next to no payment, but he taught me nothing more
than he could help. He was one of those heartless, utterly selfish men
that one meets too often in the business world. I ought never to have
been sent there, for my father had always an ill opinion of him; but he
pretended a friendly interest in me--just, I am convinced, to make the
use of me that he did.'

He was silent, and began rowing again.

'What happened them?' asked Monica.

'I mustn't make out that I was a faultless boy,' he continued, with the
smile that graved wrinkles about his eyes; 'quite the opposite. I had a
good deal of my father's temper; I often behaved very badly to my
mother; what I needed was some stern but conscientious man to look
after me and make me work. In my spare time I lay about on the shore,
or got into mischief with other boys. It needed my mother's