tick at my work and keep my mind easy.... Lucky that it's summer;
I don't need fires. Any corner would do for me where I can be quiet and see
the sun.... Wonder whether some cottager in Surrey would house and feed me
for fifteen shillings a week?... No use lying here. Better get up and see
how things look after an hour's walk.'

So the young man arose and clad himself, and went out into the shining
street. His name was Goldthorpe. His years were not yet three-and-twenty.
Since the age of legal independence he had been living alone in London,
solitary and poor, very proud of a wholehearted devotion to the career of
authorship. As soon as he slipped out of the stuffy house, the live air,
perfumed with freshness from meadows and hills afar, made his blood pulse
joyously. He was at the age of hope, and something within him, which did
not represent mere youthful illusion, supported his courage in the face of
calculations such as would have damped sober experience. With boyish step,
so light and springy that it seemed anxious to run and leap, he took his
way through a suburb south of Thames, and pushed on towards the first
rising of the Surrey hills. And as he walked resolve strengthened itself in
his heart. Somehow or other he would live independently through the next
three months. If the worst came to the worst, he could earn bread as clerk
or labourer, but as long as his money lasted he would pursue his purpose,
and that alone. He sang to himself in this gallant determination, happy as
if some one had left him a fortune.

In an ascending road, quiet and tree-shadowed, where the dwellings on
either side were for the most part old and small, though here and there a
brand-new edifice on a larger scale showed that the neighbourhood was
undergoing change such as in our time destroys the picturesque in all
London suburbs, the cheery dreamer chanced to turn his eyes upon a spot of
desolation which aroused his curiosity and set his fancy at work. Before
him stood three deserted houses, a little row once tenanted by middle-class
folk, but now for some time unoccupied and unrepaired. They were of brick,
but the fronts had a stucco facing cut into imitation of ashlar, and
weathered to the sombrest grey. The windows of the ground floor and of that
above, and the fanlights above the doors, were boarded up, a guard against
unlicensed intrusion; the top story had not been thought to stand in need
of this protection, and a few panes were b