He had come back from his brief holiday dejected and disheartened. It seemed to him that she who was his lode-star was more remote from him than she had ever been—more and more remote—vanishing into a distant world where it was vain for him to follow. He had failed in the task that she had imposed upon him. He was no nearer the solution of that dark mystery which troubled her life than he had been when he first promised to help her. How poor and impotent a creature he must appear in her eyes. His only discoveries had been negative. All that his keen, trained intellect, sharpened by seven years of legal experience, had been able to do was to prove the unsoundness of her own theory. He had started no theory upon his part. No flash of genius had illumined the obscurity which surrounded Godfrey Carmichael’s death. He went on with his plodding work, resolutely bent upon doing the utmost that patient labour can do to insure success. Even if it were all vain and futile—that hope of winning favour in her eyes—the mere possibility of standing better with her, of showing her that he was of the stuff which goes to the making of distinguished men—even this was worth working for. “She may have great offers by-and-by,” he told himself, recalling what Lord Cheriton had said about his daughter’s chances. “With her beauty and her expectations, to say nothing of her present means, she is sure of distinguished admirers; but at the worst she cannot look down upon a man who is on the road to success in her father’s profession.” This ever-present consideration, joined to his love of his calling, sweetened all that was dry and dull in the initial stages of a barrister’s career. While other men of his age were spending their evenings at the Gaiety Theatre, seeing the same burlesque and laughing at the same jokes night after night, as appetite grew with what it fed on, Theodore was content to sit in chambers and read law. It was not that he was wanting in appreciation of the drama. There was no man in London better able to enjoy the dignity of Hamlet at the Lyceum, or the rollicking fun of the Gaiety Bluebeard. He was no pedantic piece of clay, proud of the dulness that calls itself virtue. He was only an earnest worker, bent upon a given result, and able to put aside every hindrance upon the road that he was travelling. “They that run in a race run all, but one obtaineth the prize,” he said to himself, recalling a sentence in an epistle that he had learned years ago at his mother’s knee, words that always brought back the cold brightness of early spring, and a period of extra church services, long sermons in the lamp-lit church, and the voices of strange preachers, a time of daffodils and fish dinners, and much talk of High and Low Church. He had never faltered in his religious convictions; yet in the days of his youth that Lenten season in a country town, that recurrent sound of church bells in the chilly March twilight, had weighed heavy upon his soul.