He was overcome with a fear that he might not be able to convey with sufficient force the design which had wholly possessed him.  So painful was the struggle in him between enthusiasm and a consciousness of failing faculties, that Sidney grasped his hand and begged him to speak simply, without effort.

’Have no fear about my understanding you.  We’ve talked a great deal together, and I know very well what your strongest motives are.  Trust me to sympathise with you.’

’I do!  If I hadn’t that trust, Sidney, I couldn’t have felt the joy I did when you spoke to me of my Jane.  You’ll help me to carry out my plan; you and Jane will; you and Jane!  I’ve got to be such an old man all at once, as it seems, and I dursn’t have waited much longer without telling you what I had in my mind.  See now, I’ll go back to when I was a boy, as far back as I can remember.  You know I was born in Clerkenwell, and I’ve told you a little now and then of the hard times I went through.  My poor father and mother came out of the country, thinking to better themselves; instead of that, they found nothing but cold and hunger, and toil and moil.  They were both dead by when I was between thirteen and fourteen.  They died in the same winter—­a cruel winter.  I used to go about begging bits of firewood from the neighbours.  There was a man in our house who kept dogs, and I remember once catching hold of a bit of dirty meat—­I can’t call it meat—­that one of them had gnawed and left on the stairs; and I ate it, as if I’d been a dog myself, I was that driven with hunger.  Why, I feel the cold and the hunger at this minute!  It was a cruel winter, that, and it left me alone.  I had to get my own living as best I could.

’No teaching.  I was nineteen before I could read the signs over shops, or write my own name.  Between nineteen and twenty I got all the education I ever was to have, paying a man with what I could save out of my earnings.  The blessing was I had health and strength, and with hard struggling I got into a regular employment.  At five-and-twenty I could earn my pound a week, pretty certain.  When it got to five shillings more, I must needs have a wife to share it with me.  My poor girl came to live with me in a room in Hill Street.

I’ve never spoken to you of her, but you shall hear it all now, cost me what it may in the telling.  Of course she was out of a poor home, and she’d known as well as me what it was to go cold and hungry.  I sometimes think, Sidney, I can see a look of her in Jane’s face—­ but she was prettier than Jane; yes, yes, prettier than Jane.  And to think a man could treat a poor little thing like her the way I did!—­you don’t know what sort of a man Michael Snowdon was then; no, you don’t know what I was then.  You’re not to think I ill-used her in the common way; I never raised my hand, thank God! and I never spoke a word a man should be ashamed of.  But I was a hard, self-willed, stubborn fool How she came to like me and to marry