The Argosy — page 338: what you’re looking at

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

The Missing Rubtes. 317 touch of disappointment. Yet, something seemed to say that a man might safely put his fate into the hands of Beatrice Ward, and never repent having given her his entire trust. When he rose to take his leave, the Miltons begged him to return and dine with them. As has been already said, his old friends had drifted away from him, and there was great need of following Mr. Corder’s counsel and beginning again. Many old companions were left behind in India ; and from others Godwin had, himself, proudly withdrawn, with all the morbid haughtiness of a man who feels the time is out of joint. Few knew where to look for him, even if they had desired to find him ; for London is a capital place to get lost in, and Bulstrode-street is well removed from fashionable clubs and promenades. And finding that the clouds were thickening round his life, Godwin Earle had avoided the favourite haunts of those who had once been in his own set, and led a hermit-life existence in the midst of a crowd. When we come fairly out into the light there are few of us who do not look back, a little contemptuously, on the old selves that walked in the shade. What poor creatures we were in those days! Why did we persist in silence and isolation when there were ready hands and kind hearts waiting for us among the millions around us? Why could we not see that, in spite of all its badness, this much-abused old world is by no means destitute of helpers and sympathisers ? Why in- deed ? Difficult questions to answer, perhaps ; and yet when the head is sick and the heart faint, one may not have spirit enough to put one’s fellow-men to the test. Godwin, walking back cheerfully to Bulstrode-street (after having accepted the invitation to dinner), was disposed to be quite severe on himself for his former misery and deplorable dejection. In the course of the evening he found an opportunity of saying a few words privately to Beatrice. Mrs. Milton had been called out of the room; her husband was smoking his nightly pipe among the ferns and geraniums in the little paved yard, and Godwin and Beatrice were left alone. “So you don’t regret your walk in the dawn?” he said in a low voice. ‘‘ But, somehow, I can’t think it was my true self you saw then; I hardly care to claim kinship with the man who was so brutally resolved to resist your entreaties. I must have been mad— really mad—at that time !” ‘“We all have our mad moments,” Beatrice answered. ‘‘ And I think solitude would soon make me mad. Don’t fancy I don’t know something of all that you have felt. When I sat alone in an empty cottage, and the twilight was creeping over the little room, I began to have strange fancies. It takes almost a divine courage to go on living when we feel that there is nothing left to live for. And yet, how many people do it, and we never think of them as_ heroes or heroines at all.” | conniclbooolks (SO)