he sky was dark. The few people whom
he encountered seemed to be out upon mysterious errands, seemed to
emerge strangely from one gloom and strangely to vanish into another.
In the blind, black facades of the streets the public-houses blazed
invitingly with gas; they alone were alive in the weekly death of the
town; and they gleamed everywhere, at every corner; the town appeared to
consist chiefly of public-houses. He dropped the letter into the box in
the market-place; he heard it fall. His heart beat. The deed was now
irrevocable. He wondered what Monday held for him. The quiescent
melancholy of the town invaded his spirit, and mingled with his own
remorseful sorrow for the unstrenuous past, and his apprehensive
solicitude about the future. It was not unpleasant, this brooding
sadness, half-despondency and half-hope. A man and a woman, arm-in-arm,
went by him as he stood unconscious of his conspicuousness under the
gas-lamp that lit the post-office. They laughed the smothered laugh of
intimacy to see a tall boy standing alone there, with no overcoat,
gazing at naught. Edwin turned to go home. It occurred to him that
nearly all the people he met were couples, arm-in-arm. And he suddenly
thought of Florence, the clog-dancer. He had scarcely thought of her
for months. The complexity of the interests of life, and the
interweaving of its moods, fatigued his mind into an agreeably grave
vacuity.

VOLUME ONE, CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.

END OF A STRUGGLE.

It was not one of his official bilious attacks that Darius had on the
following day; he only yielded himself up in the complete grand manner
when nature absolutely compelled. The goose had not formally beaten
him, but neither had he formally beaten the goose. The battle was
drawn, and this meant that Darius had a slight headache, a feeling of
heavy disgust with the entire polity of the universe, and a
disinclination for food. The first and third symptoms he hid as far as
possible, from pride: at breakfast he toyed with bacon, from pride,
hating bacon. The children knew from his eyes and his guilty gestures
that he was not well, but they dared not refer to his condition; they
were bound to pretend that the health of their father flourished in the
highest perfection. And they were glad that things were no worse.

On the other hand Edwin had a sneezing cold which he could not conceal,
and Darius inimically inquired what foolishness he had committed to have