Perhaps of all these broader thoroughfares, Shadrack-road was the shabbiest. It had struggled into existence later than the rest, and in all its dismal length could boast but one of those substantial old red-brick mansions whose occasional appearance redeemed the commonness of the other high roads. There was a sprinkling of humble shops, a seamen’s lodging-house, a terrace or two of shabby-genteel houses, three-storied, with little iron balconies that had never been painted within the memory of man; poor sordid-looking little houses, which were always putting bills in their smoke-darkened windows, beseeching people to come and lodge in them. There were a few modern villas, of the speculative-builders’ pattern, whose smart freshness put to shame their surroundings; and one of these, a corner one, with about half a perch of garden-ground, was distinguished by a red lamp and a brass-plate, on which appeared the following inscription: MR. LUCIUS DAVOREN, _Surgeon_. Here Lucius Davoren had begun the battle of life; actual life, in all its cold reality; hard and common and monotonous, and on occasion hopeless; a life strangely different from the explorer’s adventurous days, from the trapper’s lonely commune with nature in the trackless pine-woods; a life wherein the veriest dreamer could find scant margin for poetry; a life whose dull realities weigh down the soul of man as though an iron hand were laid upon his brain, grinding out every aspiration for better things than the day’s food and the night’s shelter. He stands alone in the world; there is comfort at least in that. Let the struggle be sharp as it may, there is no cherished companion to share the pain. Let poverty’s stern grip pinch him never so sharply, he feels the pinch alone. Father, mother, the child sister, whom he loved so dearly fifteen years ago, are all dead. Their graves lie far away in a Hampshire churchyard, the burial-place of that rural village of which his father was Rector for thirty years of his unambitious life. He has another sister, but she was counted lost some years ago, and to think of her is worse than to think of the dead. In all those years, from the time when he was a lad just emancipated from Winchester school to this present hour, he has never been heard to speak her name; but he keeps her in his memory nevertheless, and has the record of her hapless fate hidden away in the secret-drawer of his desk, with a picture of the face whose beauty was fatal.