he payments had
ceased. He had said nothing to his father.

And now the share had matured, and there was the unimaginable sum
waiting for him! He got his hat and a stamp, and hurried to the Cock
Yard. The secretary, in his private room now, gave him five notes as
though the notes had been naught but tissue paper, and he accepted them
in the same inhuman manner. The secretary asked him if he meant to take
out another share, and from sheer moral cowardice he said that he did
mean to do so; and he did so, on the spot. And in less than ten minutes
he was back at the shop. Nothing had happened there. The other horses
had not come down from Bleakridge, and the men had not come out of the
Dragon. But he had fifty pounds in his pocket, and it was lawfully his.
A quarter of an hour earlier he positively could not have conceived the
miracle.

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

FOUR.

Two days later, on the Wednesday evening, Edwin was in his new bedroom,
overlooking his father's garden, with a glimpse of the garden of Lane
End House. His chamber, for him, was palatial, and it was at once the
symbol and the scene of his new life. A stranger entering would have
beheld a fair-sized room, a narrow bed, two chairs, an old-fashioned
table, a new wardrobe, an old dressing-table, a curious carpet and
hearthrug, low bookshelves on either side of the fireplace, and a few
prints and drawings, not all of them framed, on the distempered walls.
A stranger might have said in its praise that it was light and airy.
But a stranger could not have had the divine vision that Edwin had.
Edwin looked at it and saw clearly, and with the surest conviction, that
it was wonderful. He stood on the hearthrug, with his back to the
hearth, bending his body concavely and then convexly with the idle easy
sinuousness of youth, and he saw that it was wonderful. As an organic
whole it was wonderful. Its defects were qualities. For instance, it
had no convenience for washing; but with a bathroom a few yards off, who
would encumber his study (it was a study) with washing apparatus? He
had actually presented his old ramshackle washstand to the attic which
was to be occupied by Mrs Nixon's niece, a girl engaged to aid her aunt
in the terrible work of keeping clean a vast mansion.

And the bedroom could show one or two details that in a bedroom were
luxurious. Chief of these were the carpet, the hearthrug, and