Have
patience with me, darling, a little longer.'
He knelt by her, and looked up into her face.
'Say only one or two kind words--like you used to!'
She passed her hand lightly over his hair, and murmured something
with a faint smile.
Then Reardon took his hat and stick and descended the eight
flights of stone steps, and walked in the darkness round the
outer circle of Regent's Park, racking his fagged brain in a
hopeless search for characters, situations, motives.
CHAPTER V. THE WAY HITHER
Even in mid-rapture of his marriage month he had foreseen this
possibility; but fate had hitherto rescued him in sudden ways
when he was on the brink of self-abandonment, and it was hard to
imagine that this culmination of triumphant joy could be a
preface to base miseries.
He was the son of a man who had followed many different pursuits,
and in none had done much more than earn a livelihood. At the age
of forty--when Edwin, his only child, was ten years old--Mr
Reardon established himself in the town of Hereford as a
photographer, and there he abode until his death, nine years
after, occasionally risking some speculation not inconsistent
with the photographic business, but always with the result of
losing the little capital he ventured.
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