Something like a thrill, the thrill of fear, passed over him as he remembered that there was no home.  It was in the winter, a year and a half after his arrival in town, that he had suffered the loss of his father.  He lay for many days prostrate, overwhelmed with sorrow and with the thought that now indeed he was utterly alone in the world.  Miss Deacon was to live with another cousin in Yorkshire; the old home was at last ended and done.  He felt sorry that he had not written more frequently to his father:  there were things in his cousin’s letters that had made his heart sore.  “Your poor father was always looking for your letters,” she wrote, “they used to cheer him so much.  He nearly broke down when you sent him that money last Christmas; he got it into his head that you were starving yourself to send it him.  He was hoping so much that you would have come down this Christmas, and kept asking me about the plum-puddings months ago.”

It was not only his father that had died, but with him the last strong link was broken, and the past life, the days of his boyhood, grew faint as a dream.  With his father his mother died again, and the long years died, the time of his innocence, the memory of affection.  He was sorry that his letters had gone home so rarely; it hurt him to imagine his father looking out when the post came in the morning, and forced to be sad because there was nothing.  But he had never thought that his father valued the few lines that he wrote, and indeed it was often difficult to know what to say.  It would have been useless to write of those agonizing nights when the pen seemed an awkward and outlandish instrument, when every effort ended in shameful defeat, or of the happier hours when at last wonder appeared and the line glowed, crowned and exalted.  To poor Mr. Taylor such tales would have seemed but trivial histories of some Oriental game, like an odd story from a land where men have time for the infinitely little, and can seriously make a science of arranging blossoms in a jar, and discuss perfumes instead of politics.  It would have been useless to write to the rectory of his only interest, and so he wrote seldom.

And then he had been sorry because he could never write again and never see his home.  He had wondered whether he would have gone down to the old place at Christmas, if his father had lived.  It was curious how common things evoked the bitterest griefs, but his father’s anxiety that the plum-pudding should be good, and ready for him, had brought the tears into his eyes.  He could hear him saying in a nervous voice that attempted to be cheerful:  “I suppose you will be thinking of the Christmas puddings soon, Jane; you remember how fond Lucian used to be of plum-pudding.  I hope we shall see him this December.”  No doubt poor Miss Deacon paled with rage at the suggestion that she should make Christmas pudding in July; and returned a sharp answer; but it was pathetic.  The wind wailed, and the rain