It was five o’clock on a June morning.  The dirty-buff blind of the lodging-house bedroom shone like cloth of gold as the sun’s unclouded rays poured through it, transforming all they illumined, so that things poor and mean seemed to share in the triumphant glory of new-born day.  In the bed lay a young man who had already been awake for an hour.  He kept stirring uneasily, but with no intention of trying to sleep again.  His eyes followed the slow movement of the sunshine on the wall-paper, and noted, as they never had done before, the details of the flower pattern, which represented no flower wherewith botanists are acquainted, yet, in this summer light, turned the thoughts to garden and field and hedgerow.  The young man had a troubled mind, and his thoughts ran thus:—­

’I must have three months at least, and how am I to live?...  Fifteen shillings a week—­not quite that, if I spread my money out.  Can one live on fifteen shillings a week—­rent, food, washing?...  I shall have to leave these lodgings at once.  They’re not luxurious, but I can’t live here under twenty-five, that’s clear....  Three months to finish my book.  It’s good; I’m hanged if it isn’t!  This time I shall find a publisher.  All I have to do is to stick at my work and keep my mind easy....  Lucky that it’s summer; I don’t need fires.  Any corner would do for me where I can be quiet and see the sun....  Wonder whether some cottager in Surrey would house and feed me for fifteen shillings a week?...  No use lying here.  Better get up and see how things look after an hour’s walk.’

So the young man arose and clad himself, and went out into the shining street.  His name was Goldthorpe.  His years were not yet three-and-twenty.  Since the age of legal independence he had been living alone in London, solitary and poor, very proud of a wholehearted devotion to the career of authorship.  As soon as he slipped out of the stuffy house, the live air, perfumed with freshness from meadows and hills afar, made his blood pulse joyously.  He was at the age of hope, and something within him, which did not represent mere youthful illusion, supported his courage in the face of calculations such as would have damped sober experience.  With boyish step, so light and springy that it seemed anxious to run and leap, he took his way through a suburb south of Thames, and pushed on towards the first rising of the Surrey hills.  And as he walked resolve strengthened itself in his heart.  Somehow or other he would live independently through the next three months.  If the worst came to the worst, he could earn bread as clerk or labourer, but as long as his money lasted he would pursue his purpose, and that alone.  He sang to himself in this gallant determination, happy as if some one had left him a fortune.