of moments that he was thus dazzled by a flash of hope; in another it had disappeared and he was in darkness still darker than before. No, he was helpless; for he could only have gone home; and where would have been the good of that? Whatever there might be before him, he must bear it as best he could; and the fly, as it imperturbably rolled on, seemed to be the instrument of some mysterious force against which it was useless to fight. And as, with a glooming gaze, he continued to stare out of window, in the gathering dark the heath appeared so inexpressibly forlorn and ghostly that his melancholy grew yet more intense. He wondered if in the whole world there was any one half so wretched as he. How happy and contented they must be, the people who were clustering round the fires which glowed so comfortably through the red blinds of the little cottages by the roadside! How cheerful they looked, the labourers he met trudging by! But could any one be otherwise, who was not being carried off to school?
A few moments more and the fly turned in at a gate and running smoothly and softly over the gravel of a drive, stopped at last before a portico of which the pillars glimmered white in the shades of the winter evening now fast drawing in. The driver clambered down and pulled out the bell; the echoes it awoke appeared to speak of an endless series of great empty rooms and passages. He tried to make out what the place was like; but it was now too dark to be able to see more than that the house was big and high and looked singularly mysterious and forbidding; to the left there seemed to be a sort of shrubbery beyond which again was another building with one long range of lighted windows; across their uncurtained panes from time to time moved dark figures which must surely be those of the boys. But at that moment the door was opened by a maid-servant who with much bantering the while—everybody but himself had some one to speak to—helped the man to carry in his box; and he himself got slowly out and went indoors:—just to his fancy, it seemed, like one of those State prisoners he had read of, who, when
