“You mean, then, sir, that you will have no further need for my services?” said Henry, looking somewhat pale; for it is one thing to hate the means of one’s livelihood, and another to exchange it for none.

“I’m afraid, my dear lad, that that is what it comes to.  We are, I hope you will believe, exceedingly sorry to come to such a conclusion, both for our own sakes and yours, as well as that of your father,—­who is an old and valued friend of ours; but we are able to see no other way out of the difficulty.  Of course, you will not leave us this minute; but take what time you need to look round and arrange your future plans; and so far as we are concerned, we shall part from you as good friends and sincere well-wishers.”

The old man held out his hand, and Henry took it, with a grateful sense of the friendly manner in which Mr. Lingard had performed a painful task, and a certain recognition that, after all, a poet must be something of a nuisance to business-men.

When he returned to his desk, he sat for a long time thoughtful, divided in mind between exultation that he was soon to be free to take the adventurous highway of literature, and anxiety as to where in a month’s time his preliminary meals were to come from.

Yet, after all, the main thing was to be free of this servitude.  Out of freedom all things might be hoped.

Still, as Henry looked round at the familiar faces of his fellow-clerks, and realised that in a month’s time his comradeship with them would be at an end, he was surprised to feel a certain pang of separation.  Mere custom has so great a part in our affections, that though a routine may have been dull and distasteful, if it has any extenuating circumstances at all, we change it with a certain irrational regret.  After all, his office-life was associated with much contraband merriment; and, unconsciously, his associates had taken a valuable part in his training, humanised him in certain directions, as he had humanised them in others.  They had saved him from dilettanteism, and whatever he wrote in future would owe something warm and kindly to the years he had spent with them.

His very desk took on a pathetic expression, as of a place that was so soon to know him no more for ever; and Mr. Smith, wrangling over wet-traps and cesspools at the counter, just as on the first day he had heard him, almost moved him to tears.  Perhaps in ten years’ time, were he to come back, he would find him still at his post, fervidly engaged in the same altercations, with only a little additional greyness at the temples to mark the lapse of time.

And Jenkins would still be sitting in the little screened-off cupboard, with “cashier” painted on the glass window.  As three o’clock approached, he would still be heard loudly counting his cash and shovelling the gold into wash-leather bags, and the silver into little paper-bags marked L5 apiece, in a wild rush to reach the bank before it closed.