F. Anstey

“ Lionel is still young enough to delight in them.
Feeling in his pocket, Rolleston discovers more loose silver than he thought he possessed, and so he goes into the shop and asks for one of the boxes of soldiers. He is served by one of two neatly dressed female assistants, who stare and giggle at one another at his first words, finding it odd. perhaps, that a fellow of his age should buy toys—as if, he thinks indignantly, they couldn't see that it was not for himself he wanted the things. ”

“ When Betty does think proper to come up and open the door he will tell her that it is too bad keeping a fellow standing out here, in the fog and cold, all this time. ... She is coming at last—no, it was fancy; it seems as if Betty had slipped out for something, and perhaps the cook is upstairs, and his mother may be dozing by the fire, as she has begun to do of late.
Losing all patience, he gropes for the knocker, and, groping in vain, begins to hammer with bare fists on the door, louder and louder, until he is interrupted by a rough voice from the railings behind him. ”

“ They never have got on very well together; Lionel is so different—much cleverer even already, for one thing; better looking, too, and better tempered. Whatever they quarreled about, Wilfred was very sure that he was the offender; Lionel never begins that kind of thing. But he will put himself in the right at once, and ask Lionel to make friends again; he will consent readily enough—he always does. ”

“ The past, blotted out completely for an hour by some freak of the memory, comes back to him, and he sees his sullen, morbid boyhood changing into something worse still, until by slow degrees he became what he is now—dissipated, degraded, lost. ”

“ And the constable goes, taking care, however, to keep an eye occasionally on the corner where this has taken place. He has not gone long before Rolleston raises his head with a husky laugh; his manner has changed now; he is no longer the boy in thought and expression that he was a short time before, and speaks as might be expected from his appearance.
"I remember it all now," he says. "You are Ethel Gordon, of course you are, and you wouldn't have anything to do with me—and quite right, too—and then you married my brother Lionel. ”

“ Drink is always playing me some cursed trick now. A pretty fool I must have made of myself!"
She says nothing, and he thrusts his hands deep in his ragged pockets. "Hallo! what's this I've got?" he says, as he feels something at the bottom of one of them; and, bringing out the box of soldiers he had bought half an hour before, he holds it up with a harsh laugh which has the ring of despair in it.
"Do you see this?" he says to her. "You'll laugh when I tell you it's a toy I bought just now for—guess whom—for your dear husband! ”

“ The dusk is falling, and the shops he passes are brilliant with lights and decorations,, but he does not stop to look at any of them; his mind is busy with settling how he shall employ himself on this the first evening of his liberty, the first for so long on which he could feel his own master. ”

“ Temperaments which are subject to fits of heavy and causeless depression have their compensations sometimes in the reaction which follows; the infesting cares, as in Longfellow's poem, "fold their tents, like the Arabs, and as silently steal away," and with their retreat comes an exquisite exhilaration which more equable dispositions can never experience. ”

“ He is dull and crabbed and uncouth, and knows too well that he is an object of general dislike; no one there cares to associate with him, and he makes no attempt to overcome their prejudices, being perfectly aware that they are different from him, and hating them for it, but hating himself, perhaps, the most. ”

“ In a second he is in the constable's strong grasp and being dragged, struggling violently, to the gate, when a soft voice, a woman's, intercedes for him.
"What is the matter? Oh, don't—don't be so rough with him, poor creature!" it cries pitifully.
"I'm only exercisin' my duty, mum," says the officer; "he wants to create a disturbance 'ere."
"No," cries Wilfred, "he lies! I only want to get into my own house, and no one seems to hear me. You don't think anything is the matter, do you?"
It is a lady who has been pleading for him ”

“ To-night he will not have to sit up struggling with the tasks which will only cover him with fresh disgrace on the morrow; for a whole month he need not think of them, nor of the classes in which the hand of every one is against him. ”

“ Some of the window-panes are broken; there is a pale gray patch in one that looks like a dingy bill; the knocker has been unscrewed from the door, and on its scraped panels some one has scribbled words and rough caricatures that were surely not there when he left that morning.
Can anything—any frightful disaster—have come in that short time? No, he will not think of it. He will not let himself be terrified, all for nothing.
"Now, are you goin'?" says the policeman after a pause.
Rolleston puts his back against the door and clings to the sides. "No!" he shouts. "I don't care what you say ”

“ Drop this 'ere tomfool game and go home quiet to wherever it is you do live."
"I tell you I live here, you fool!" shrieks Wilfred, in deadly terror lest he should be forced away before the door is opened.
"And I tell you you don't do nothing of the sort," says the policeman, beginning to lose his temper. "No one don't live 'ere, nor ain't done not since I've bin on the beat. Use your eyes if you're not too far gone."
For the first time Rolleston seems to see things plainly as they are. ”

“ And on the right there shall be a bit of the pirate island, with a mast and another black flag—he knows he will enjoy picking out the skull and cross-bones in thick Chinese white—and then, if there is room, he will add a cannon, and perhaps a palm-tree. A pirate island always has palm-trees.
He is so full of this projected picture of his that he is quite surprised to find that he is very near the square where he lives ”