hardship, care, grief, disappointment, could wear away (singular in a
period when, at two and twenty, young men declare themselves blases!),
seemed to leave him all the charm of boyhood. A season in London had
made me more a man of the world, older in heart than he was. Then, the
sorrow that gnawed him with such silent sternness. No, Captain Roland
was one of those men who seize hold of your thoughts, who mix themselves
up with your lives. The idea that Roland should die,--die with the load
at his heart unlightened,--was one that seemed to take a spring out of
the wheels of nature, all object out of the aims of life,--of my life at
least. For I had made it one of the ends of my existence to bring back
the son to the father, and restore the smile, that must have been gay
once, to the downward curve of that iron lip. But Roland was now out of
danger; and yet, like one who has escaped shipwreck, I trembled to look
back on the danger past: the voice of the devouring deep still boomed in
my ears. While rapt in my reveries, I stopped mechanically to hear a
clock strike--four; and, looking round, I perceived that I had wandered
from the heart of the City, and was in one of the streets that lead out
of the Strand. Immediately before me, on the doorsteps of a large shop
whose closed shutters were as obstinate a stillness as if they had
guarded the secrets of seventeen centuries in a street in Pompeii,
reclined a form fast asleep, the arm propped on the hard stone
supporting the head, and the limbs uneasily strewn over the stairs. The
dress of the slumberer was travel-stained, tattered, yet with the
remains of a certain pretence; an air of faded, shabby, penniless
gentility made poverty more painful, because it seemed to indicate
unfitness to grapple with it. The face of this person was hollow and
pale, but its expression, even in sleep, was fierce and hard. I drew
near and nearer; I recognized the countenance, the regular features, the
raven hair, even a peculiar gracefulness of posture: the young man whom
I had met at the inn by the way-side, and who had left me alone with the