Rufus Black’s heart grew heavier still, and his sense of dread deepened, as he steamed down to Canterbury in the express train. He had a seat by a window in a second-class compartment in which were four other passengers, but he was as much alone as if he had had the compartment to himself. His travelling companions chatted and laughed and jested among themselves, while he looked from his window upon hop-gardens, green fields, and clustering hamlets, with sad, unseeing eyes, and thought of his poverty, his friendlessness, and the slow starvation that lay before him and his young wife. “I could bear it for myself,” he thought bitterly. “But it is hard to see Lally suffer, and I know she does suffer, although she seems so light-hearted and brave. My poor little wife! Ah, what place have I in the world of gay idlers and strong workers? I am neither the one nor the other. What is to be the end of it all?” He looked enviously at the workers in a brick-yard the train was passing at that moment. There were men there, coarse and ignorant, but brawny of limb and broad of chest; and there were children too, boys and girls of tender years, working steadily for scanty pay; but they were all workers, and they looked stolidly contented with their lot. “With all my university education,” thought the boy artist bitterly, “I am less capable of self-support than those ignorant brick-makers. Why did my father bring me up with expensive tastes and like the heir of fine estates, only to cast me off to starve at the first moment I displeased him? What is the empty name of gentleman worth, if one cannot keep it and be a worker? If he had put me to some trade, I should not have been half so miserable to-day. I am only twenty years old, and my life is a failure at the outset.” The train swept on through new scenes, and the course of the young man’s musings was changed, but their bitterness remained in full strength. “I wonder what my father can want of me,” he said to himself presently. “How can he put me in the way of a fortune? He promised that I should study law, but he has forgotten the promise. With a profession to depend upon, I know I could win a competence. Perhaps it is to speak of this he has sent for me this morning. He surely cannot mean for me,” and the young man’s brow darkened, “to become a gambler, as he has been? I shall refuse, if he proposes it. For my innocent Lally’s sake, I will keep myself pure of his vices.” This resolution was strong within him when he alighted from the train at Canterbury and took a hansom cab to Wyndham village. The drive of several miles was occupied with speculations as to what his father wanted of him, and with thoughts of his young wife in her dingy lodgings at New Brompton, and he did not even notice the houses, farms and villas they passed, nor any feature of the scenery, until the horse slackened his speed to a walk, and the driver opened his small trap in the roof, and said: