Page:Life's little ironies (1894).pdf/61

been reduced in number, there waa barely enough work to do for those who remained.

The sun dropped lower and vanished, the shouts of the village children ceased to resound, darkness cloaked the students’ bedroom, and all the scene outwardly breathed peace. None knew of the fevered youthful ambitions that throbbed in two breasts within the quiet creeper-covered walls of the millwright’s house.

In a few months the brothers left the village of their birth to enter themselves as students in a training college for school-masters; first having placed their young sister Rosa under as efficient a tuition at a fashionable watering-place as the meana at their disposal could command.

A man in semi-clerical dress was walking along the road which led from the railway station into a provincial town. As he walked he read persistently, only looking up once now and then to see that he was keeping on the foot-track and to avoid other passen- gers. At those moments, whoever had known the former students at the millwright’s would have perceived that one of them, Joshua Halborough, was the peripatetic reader here.

What had been simple force in the youth's face was energized judgment in the man’s. His character was gradually writing itself out in his countenance. That he was watching his own career with deeper and deeper interest, that he continually “heard his days before him,” and cared to hear little else, might have been hazarded from what wae seen there. His ambi-