Sometimes the inmates of these lighted rooms chanced to look up and see the strained face and sombre eyes gazing through the window. Then they would make a movement of fear or of anger; or a kindly move, as if to ask him in. In either case he would turn away quickly and disappear in the darkness. He had no wish to enter, he had no desire to share their joys. He only asked to view them from without. Yet gradually the conviction grew within him that this passion was a quest: that some day he would look through a window and see a room which should seem to him that thing he had never known—Home. Grand interiors he saw, in London streets and squares; glimpses of tasteful furniture, art treasures, a suitable setting for perfectly gowned grace and beauty; swiftly concealed by the drawing of velvet curtains. It angered him that the illusive sense of home drew nearer to him in these fitful visions of wealth and loveliness than when he looked into humbler and more simple houses. All his sympathies were with those who worked and toiled, living by the soil and upon it. He liked the farmer who drank ale from a brown jug, while his pleasant wife enjoyed her dish of tea. Peering through area railings into the basement of London houses, he liked the stout cook who stood before a glowing kitchen range, toasting-fork in hand, flinging remarks over her portly print shoulder to the pretty young housemaid, perched on the kitchen table, swinging her feet and darning a stocking. He loved the grey parrot with a naughty eye, no doubt banished from the drawing-room on account of its language, sidling up and down its perch, in the cage under the window. He felt sure it was making valuable additions to its vocabulary, what time the heat of the fire on one side and the flippant attitude of the pretty housemaid on the other, annoyed the stout cook. He disliked the beautiful woman in the room above, who reclined among silken cushions, giving languid orders to a deferential butler, then waved an impatient command to the footman to draw the curtains. Yet the drawing of those curtains shut out the haunting sense of home, which had grown within him as he watched the woman among the silken cushions. He returned to his solitary rooms and spent the evening writing an article in which he decried the idle rich and extolled the humble poor. Yet, while he wrote, he wondered, half wistfully, who he might be who had the right to come in and fill the armchair drawn close to that couch of silken cushions. He wondered this; and wondering, ceased writing, lit his pipe and took to dreaming. He was a lonely youth. By degrees his gift of descriptive writing won him an acknowledged place in the world of journalism. He was trusted by an important newspaper to observe and record various historic scenes in the great metropolis—a royal funeral; a coronation; the city’s welcome to a famous general.