Page:Gissing - The Nether World, vol. III, 1889.djvu/106

 what seemed an irremediable misfortune, and brooded over it with all his might. If only Sidney Kirkwood were in the same mind as four years ago!

And now was he to believe that what he had been told about Sidney and Jane Snowdon was misleading? Was the impossible no longer so? He almost leapt from his chair when he heard that Sidney was the visitor with whom his daughter had been having her private conversation. How came they to make this appointment? There was something in Clara’s voice that set his nerves a-tremble. That night he could not sleep, and next morning he went to work with a senile quiver in his body. For the first time for more than two months he turned into a public-house on his way, just to give himself a little “tone.” The natural result of such a tonic was to heighten the fever of his imagination; goodness knows how far he had got in a drama of happiness before he threw off his coat and settled to his day’s labour.

Clara, in the meanwhile, suffered a corresponding agitation, more penetrative in proportion to the finer substance of her nature.