her heart frozen by his last cynical laugh.

Brookes finds his way down the stairs, through the unlighted hall,
and lets himself out in the chill October air.

He goes down the street feeling a confused sense of having
inflicted pain and left distress behind him, but his own sensation
of irritation, his own vexation and angry resentment against his
lot in life, all but obliterate it.

For some seconds he walks on with all his thoughts merged together
in a mere desperate and painful confusion. "Only a hundred a year!"
is his plainest, most bitter reflection. "Five-and-twenty, and only
earning a hundred a year!"

Brookes is not of a calm temperament. His nervous system is tensely
strung, and generally, owing to various incidental matters,
slightly out of tune, or at anyrate, feels so.

His circulation is rapid, every pulse beats strongly, and the blood
flows hotly in his veins.

His mental nature is of much the same order--passionate, excitable,
and impatient; but there is such a heavy curb-rein of control
perpetually upon it, that its three leading qualities jar inwardly
upon himself more than they show to outsiders.

Even now the confused, excited disorder in his brain is soon
regulated and calmed by his will, and as he walks on he lapses into
trying to recollect whether he has said all he meant to.

He concludes that he has, and a certain satisfaction comes over
him.

"Well, I have told her my views now," he reflects. "She sees what I
think, and what my principles are. She won't wonder that I say
nothing. I shall try for another post and a rise of salary, and
then--"

Stephen's character was a fine one in its way. The capacity for
self-command and self-denial was tremendous, his sense of honour
keen, his adherence to that which he conceived the right
inflexible, his will immutable; but of the subtler sweetness of
the human heart he had none.

Of sympathy, the divine [Greek: sym, pathos], _the suffering with_,
he had not the vaguest conception: of its faint and poor
reflections, pity and mercy, he had but a dim idea.

He stuck as well as he could to what he thought was the right
path, and as to the feelings of others, he could not be blamed for
not considering them, for he had never practically realized that
they had any.

In the present circumstances he had a few, fine, adamantine rules
for conduct, which he was going to steadfastly apply, and he
thought no more of the girl's feelings under them than