list could do no more than grant his genial signature for the
specified purpose, and add good wishes in abundance. Reardon went home
with his brain in a whirl. He had had his first glimpse of what was
meant by literary success. That luxurious study, with its shelves of
handsomely-bound books, its beautiful pictures, its warm, fragrant
air--great heavens! what might not a man do who sat at his ease amid
such surroundings!

He began to work at the Reading-room, but at the same time he thought
often of the novelist's suggestion, and before long had written two or
three short stories. No editor would accept them; but he continued to
practise himself in that art, and by degrees came to fancy that,
after all, perhaps he had some talent for fiction. It was significant,
however, that no native impulse had directed him to novel-writing. His
intellectual temper was that of the student, the scholar, but strongly
blended with a love of independence which had always made him think
with distaste of a teacher's life. The stories he wrote were scraps
of immature psychology--the last thing a magazine would accept from an
unknown man.

His money dwindled, and there came a winter during which he suffered
much from cold and hunger. What a blessed refuge it was, there under the
great dome, when he must else have sat in his windy garret with the
mere pretence of a fire! The Reading-room was his true home; its warmth
enwrapped him kindly; the peculiar odour of its atmosphere--at first a
cause of headache--grew dear and delightful to him. But he could not sit
here until his last penny should be spent. Something practical must be
done, and practicality was not his strong point.

Friends in London he had none; but for an occasional conversation with
his landlady he would scarcely have spoken a dozen words in a week.
His disposition was the reverse of democratic, and he could not make
acquaintances below his own intellectual level. Solitude fostered
a sensitiveness which to begin with was extreme; the lack of stated
occupation encouraged his natural tendency to dream and procrastinate
and hope for the improbable. He was a recluse in the midst of millions,
and viewed with dread the necessity of going forth to fight for daily
food.

Little by little he had ceased to hold any correspondence with his
former friends at Hereford. The only person to whom he still wrote and
from whom he still heard was his mother's father--an old man who lived
at De