While he was in the midst of his period of verse-writing his mother died,
and in the following year, just as he was working at his stories, he
received a telegram calling him to attend his father's death-bed. When the
old man was laid in the shadow of the weather-beaten village church, Hubert
gathered all his belongings and bade farewell for ever to the Shropshire
rectory.

In London Hubert made few friends. There were some two or three men with
whom he was frequently seen--quiet folk like himself, whose enjoyment
consisted in smoking a tranquil pipe in the evening, or going for long
walks in the country. He was one of those men whose indefiniteness provokes
curiosity, and his friends noticed and wondered why it was that he was so
frequently the theme of their conversation. His simple, unaffected manners
were full of suggestion, and in his writings there was always an
indefinable rainbow-like promise of ultimate achievement. So, long before
he had succeeded in writing a play, detached scenes and occasional verses
led his friends into gradual belief that he was one from whom big things
might be expected. And when the one-act play which they had all so heartily
approved of was produced, and every newspaper praised it for its literary
quality, the friends took pride in this public vindication of their
opinion. After the production of his play people came to see the new
author, and every Saturday evening some fifteen or twenty men used to
assemble in Hubert's lodgings to drink whisky, smoke cigars, and talk
drama. Encouraged by his success, Hubert wrote _Divorce_. He worked
unceasingly upon it for more than a year, and when he had written the final
scene, he was breaking into his last hundred pounds. The play was refused
twice, and then accepted by a theatrical speculator, to whom it seemed to
afford opportunity for the exhibition of the talents of a lady he was
interested in.