nd that I
did not wish to be vexed in my slumber. It was a rude and foolish
letter, I make no doubt; but I wrote it with a decent purpose enough,
for I was desperately afraid that I could not hold to my resolutions and
to my way of life if I kept in communication with Lancelot, and was
haunted by the thoughts of his more fortunate stars. Lancelot wrote back
to me with his invariable sweetness and gentleness, saying that he hoped
time would make me amends; and after that I heard no more from him, and
he seemed to have passed out of my life for good and all.

As for Mr. Davies, he too seemed to belong to the old life from which I
had cut myself adrift, and so I went to his shop no more; and as he was
a home-keeping bookworm, he but seldom stirred abroad. And thus, though
we dwelt in the same town, I may fairly say that I never saw him from
month's end to month's end.

The days slip by swiftly in an unnoticeable kind of way in a town like
Sendennis. It was but a sluggish place, for all its sea-bustle, in the
days that now lie far behind me. Our shop lay in the quietest part of
the town, and we took no note of time. Ours was a grey, lonely life. We
had friends, of course, whose names and ways I have long since
forgotten, but we saw little of them, partly because my mother learnt
after a while that I hated all company, and would take no part in any of
the junketings of our neighbours.

I might have made an apt mercer in time, but I do not know, and I do not
love to linger over the two years I spent in the trial. For though I
did my duty fairly well, both by my mother and by the shop, and though
my love-ache had dulled almost to nothing, my passion to go abroad was
as hot as ever, and I thought it a shame that my twenty years had no
better business, and my life no other aim, than to wear out its strength
behind a counter. Let those two years go by.

One evening I was sitting with my mother in the little parlour behind
the shop, she knitting, I think, or sewing--I am not sure which--and I
with my legs thrust out before me and my hands in my pockets, outwardly
idling and inwardly cursing at my destiny. Every now and then my mother
glanced at me over the edge of her work and sighed; but it may have
been, and I hope it was, because she found her task a difficult one.

Suddenly the bell at the front door tinkled. In my younger days I used
to fancy that every ring of that same cracked bell brought some message
from the outer w