Page:The Yellow Book - 07.djvu/209

 slender education and narrow opportunities of small means, inevitably, as years went on, contracted her mind to a degree woefully incomprehensible to the brothers for whom she had thus helped to make a wider life possible, we may be consoled to think that she could successfully, for her part, bridge over the chasm which lay between them by cheerful pride in their success. A certain brisk cheerfulness was certainly the pivot of her life; there was neither self-consciousness nor wistfulness about her immolation. She bent now as spiritedly over the machine as in the morning hours, not sensitive to the incongruity of her employment with the magic of the summer twilight.

Alas! she was not sensitive. She never quite understood. It was one of the impossibilities of existence that any spiritual suspicion should acquaint her of the little figure outside on the stairs in the dark, with slow tears creeping down his cheeks.

For he was silently crying.

He was so very, very lonely, and there was no one in the world who would come to him.

In future years a very strong sense of the ridiculous could never make him smile at the remembrance of that hour, for he recognised that, as he had at length gulped back his childish tears into his aching throat, and sat on immovably in the gathering darkness, he had there, timorously, but for evermore, set his feet in the path that alone leads beyond sorrow; the path—how shall we call it?—of accepted loneliness of soul.

It was not long ago that, after an interval of many years, he walked once again through those streets, and past his childhood's home in the tall terrace. It must have been preconcerted that there should be standing on the very steps just such another tiny boy as he himself had once been, in the immaculately clean collar and