Outside that work his life was rather colourless. Mary and Harry no longer lived at Thanshope. Harry had found work in a manufacturing village some five miles distant; he lived in a cottage on the borders of an open moor, where the air was pure, free, and bracing. He had grown, physically, much stronger in consequence of the change, and thought that his hearing, if not actually better, did not become worse so rapidly as when he lived in the town. Occasionally, on a Sunday, Myles would go over to see them, and nurse his sister’s little boy on his knee, feeling a passion of tenderness which he could not express for the little round-faced thing, with its large, solemn, dark eyes--like his own, Mary said, with affectionate pride. He would walk with Harry over the moors, and gratify him by shouting descriptions of his foreign life into his failing ears. But, except for this one day in the week, they were lost to him; their incessant toil, and his own, preventing further intercourse. Very often his dead brother occupied a place in his mind. Poor Ned! What a life he could have given him now! He could have had him to live with him, and bought him books and pictures, and given him music, and made his existence a poetry to him. But it was too late: Edmund slept his quiet sleep, killed off by the want and the sorrow which had been too much for them all, at the time of the great distress. One face was missing--that of Hoyle, his old enemy. Myles made some casual inquiries about him one day, and heard that he had left Thanshope about a year ago. He never knew the part the man had played between him and Adrienne. The young men who had once been friends of his (it seemed as if it must be hundreds of years ago), and to whose debating society he had once belonged, received him with a mixture of timidity and admiration. Many of them had advocated--perhaps still did so--the Proudhonistic theory--‘all property is a crime.’ At one time Myles had believed and ardently advocated the same delusion. He had lived faster and grown faster than these old friends of his, and now they were divided between embarrassment at his open support of one of the most flagrant property-holders of the district, and admiration of his cleverness, which had swept such gains into his own lap. Myles felt little sympathy with them, and had the uncomfortable sensation that while they were shy of discussing things before his face, they were very voluble, and chiefly about himself, behind his back.