Page:Gissing - The Nether World, vol. III, 1889.djvu/153

THE DEBT REPAID. 143 granddaughter, seeming to become at length a splendid reality. What talk had been held here between Kirkwood and himself whilst Jane listened! All gone into silence; gone, too, the hope it had encouraged.

He was weary after the morning’s absence from home, and fell into a light slumber. Dreams troubled him. First he found himself in Australia; he heard again the sudden news of his son’s death; the shock awoke him. Another dozing fit, and he was a young man with a wife and children to support; haunted with the fear of coming to want; harsh, unreasonable in his exactions at home. Something like a large black coffin came into his dream, and in dread of it he again returned to consciousness.

All night he had been thinking of the dark story of long ago,—his wife’s form motionless on the bed,—the bottle which told him what had happened. Why must that memory revive to trouble his last days? Part of his zeal for the great project had come of a feeling that he might thus in some degree repair his former ill-doing; Jane would be a providence to many hapless women whose burden was as heavy as