Page:The Yellow Book - 13.djvu/125

Rh a shrinking movement and clasped the back of the chair she had been sitting on. Was it to be eternally and indefinitely the same story? Was hers to be that weary round of endeavour which meets only with disappointment and failure? It was impossible to forget that the boy had already run away from the electric light works, where he had earnt his eighteen shillings a week, or that he had been turned away for non-attendance at the musical instrument makers, she had got him into with her brother's influence, at Hounslow. And now that she had actually staked her last farthing at Messrs. Knowler Brothers, her efforts seemed as fruitless as heretofore.

Without, in the cheerless northern suburb in which she found herself in a few moments time, there was little outward presage of the coming spring. Everywhere were the stain and soil of winter. April was already at hand, but soot hung on the skeleton tracery of the rare trees which overtopped the garden walls; only a bud, on some early flowering shrub, told of a world of green to come. Yet a wind blowing from out the west, and flapping its damp fingers in her tired face, seemed to speak of other and less sordid surroundings. The wind blew from out the west bringing its message from the sea, and with it the ever-recurring memory of the sailor husband who had been so loyal a companion to her in the brief years of their married life. Though a Swede, the elder Reinhart had suffered from exposure to the cold, a severe winter on the Atlantic helping to aggravate the chest complaint to which he succumbed at Greenwich Hospital. The end had been sudden, and it was hardly an hour before the final spasm that Mrs. Reinhart promised the dying man that their son should be spared like hardships.

Hardships ! . . . . the wet sea wind lifted the pale hair from the anaemic face and the dull eyes lighted as she thought of the Rh