en. A
delicious wave of joy and of satisfaction animated him. He had never
been up so late, within his recollection, save on a few occasions when
even infants were allowed to be up late. He was alone, secreted, master
of his time and his activity, his mind charged with novel impressions,
and a congenial work in progress. Alone? ... It was as if he was
spiritually alone in the vast solitude of the night. It was as if he
could behold the unconscious forms of all humanity, sleeping. This
feeling that only he had preserved consciousness and energy, that he was
the sole active possessor of the mysterious night, affected him in the
most exquisite manner. He had not been so nobly happy in his life. And
at the same time he was proud, in a childlike way, of being up so late.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

THREE.

He heard the door being pushed open, and he gave a jump and turned his
head. His father stood in the entrance to the attic.

"Hello, father!" he said weakly, ingratiatingly.

"What art doing at this time o' night, lad?" Darius Clayhanger
demanded.

Strange to say, the autocrat was not angered by the remarkable sight in
front of him. Edwin knew that his father would probably come home from
Manchester on the mail train, which would stop to set down a passenger
at Shawport by suitable arrangement. And he had expected that his
father would go to bed, as usual on such evenings, after having eaten
the supper left for him in the sitting-room. His father's bedroom was
next door to the sitting-room. Save for Mrs Nixon in a distant nook,
Edwin had the attic floor to himself. He ought to have been as safe
from intrusion there as in the farthest capital of Europe. His father
did not climb the attic stairs once in six months. So that he had
regarded himself as secure. Still, he must have positively forgotten
the very existence of his father; he must have been `lost,' otherwise he
could not but have heard the footsteps on the stairs.

"I was just drawing," said Edwin, with a little more confidence.

He looked at his father and saw an old man, a man who for him had always
been old, generally harsh, often truculent, and seldom indulgent. He
saw an ugly, undistinguished, and somewhat vulgar man (far less
dignified, for instance, than Big James); a man who had his way by force
and scarcely ever by argument; a man whose arguments for or against a
given course were si