The Argosy — page 281: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

a. - 260 In the Dead of Night. ‘‘Implicitly,” answered Edith, with fervour. ‘“‘When may we go and view our new home?” “ Now—to-morrow—any time. Only take the cottage, and don’t be more than a week before you are installed there.” They were installed there in less than a week, despite Mrs. Garside’s mild protestations that she couldn’t, for the life of her, understand why that strange Mr. Bristow should want them to give up their com- fortable apartments for a dull old house that looked for all the world as if it were haunted, and was built in such an out-of-the-way place that to live there was really very little better than being buried alive. But Edith’s faith in Tom was not to be shaken. She felt sure that he would not have asked them to take up their quarters in Alder Cottage without having good reasons for proposing such a removal. What those reasons were she was naturally somewhat anxious to know, but she hid her impatience from Tom, and waited with smiling resignation till it should please him to tell her the secret which she felt sure was lying perdu in his brain. That there was a secret she could not doubt, because Tom had stipulated that she should not even hint to Lionel? that the change of residence had been instigated by him. Tom was not at all like his usual self about this time. He was rest- less and uneasy, and seemed to have lost all relish for the ordinary avocations of his every-day life. There were days when he seemed as if he would give anything to get away from the company of his own thoughts, when he would hunt up some acquaintances of former years, whom he would invite to his rooms, and keep there with pressing hospitality till far into the small hours of morning. At other times he would lie on the sofa for hours together, brooding in dark- ness and solitude ; and his landlady, going in about midnight with a light, would find him lying there, broad awake, with a look in this eyes which told her that his thoughts were far away. Strange to say, the person whom Tom Bristow most frequently invited to his rooms was Jabez Creede, Mr. Hoskyns’ dissipated clerk. As already stated, Tom had known Creede when he himself was a youth in the same office, but the two men were so dissimilar in every respect that that of itself did not seem sufficient to account for the intimacy which now existed between them—an intimacy which was evidently of Tom’s own seeking. - Creede, whose life seemed to be one chronic round of debt and dissipation, would have been friendly with anybody who would have used him as Tom used him—who would have played cribbage with | him so badly that he, Creede, always rose from the table a winner ; and who would have treated him to unlimited supplies of tobacco, and innumerable glasses of Irish whiskey, hot and strong. Tom would never allow Creede to leave his rooms till he was intoxicated, not that the latter ever seemed particularly anxious to go” Gomicbooks (E(o) m