“You were very hard driven, my poor boy. You had been unlucky enough to fall in love with an unprincipled woman. You may thank Providence for having escaped a life of misery. Such an alliance as that would have wrecked your future. I would rather you married a housemaid with a good character than such a woman as Juliet Baldwin. However, there are plenty of nice girls in your own sphere, thank God, and plenty of pretty girls with unblemished character and antecedents.” Harrington went back to Dorchester with his father next day, and the acceptance was promptly honoured when it was presented at the house in Cornhill. Sir Henry had discounted it at the local bank almost immediately after it passed into his possession, and the bank had regarded the document as good value for their money, Matthew Dalbrook being very unlikely to allow his son’s signature to be dishonoured. CHAPTER XX. “All the spring-time of his love Is already gone and past.” Theodore went back to wintry London before the year was a week old. He settled himself by his lonely fireside, in the silence of his old-fashioned rooms. All he had of the beauty of this world was a glimpse of the river athwart the heavy grey mists of a London morning, or the lamps on the Embankment shining like a string of jewels in the evening dusk. There were days of sullen, hopeless fog, when even these things were hidden from him, and when it was hard work to keep that stealthy, penetrating greyness and damp cold out of his rooms. He had brought a fox-terrier from Dorchester on his return from his holiday, an old favourite that had seen the best days of her youth, and was better able to put up with a sedentary life, varied only by an occasional run, than a younger animal would have been. This faithful friend, an animated little beast even at this mature stage of her existence, lightened the burden of his loneliness, were it only by leaping on to his knees twenty times in five minutes, and only desisting therefrom upon most serious remonstrance. It was pleasant to him to have something that loved him, even this irrepressible Miss Nipper, with her sidelong grin of affectionate greeting, and her unconquerable suspicion of rats behind the wainscot. He felt less like Dr. Faustus on that famous Easter morning, when the emptiness of life and learning came home to the lonely student with such desolating intensity, when even a devil was welcome who could offer escape from that dull burden of existence.