Monica answered with all necessary detail, and went on to mention the proposal that had been made to her.  The hearer reflected, and put further questions.  Unwilling to speak of the little capital she possessed, Monica told him that her sisters might perhaps help her to live whilst she was learning a new occupation.  But Widdowson had become abstracted; he ceased pulling, crossed his arms on the oars, and watched other boats that were near.  Two deep wrinkles, rippling in their course, had formed across his forehead, and his eyes widened in a gaze of complete abstraction at the farther shore.

‘Yes,’ fell from him at length, as though in continuation of something he had been saying, ’I began to earn my bread when I was fourteen.  My father was an auctioneer at Brighton.  A few years after his marriage he had a bad illness, which left him completely deaf.  His partnership with another man was dissolved, and as things went worse and worse with him, my mother started a lodging-house, which somehow supported us for a long time.  She was a sensible, good, and brave woman.  I’m afraid my father had a good many faults that made her life hard.  He was of a violent temper, and of course the deafness didn’t improve it.  Well, one day a cab knocked him down in the King’s Road, and from that injury, though not until a year after, he died.  There were only two children; I was the elder.  My mother couldn’t keep me at school very long, so, at fourteen, I was sent into the office of the man who had been my father’s partner, to serve him and learn the business.  I did serve him for years, and for next to no payment, but he taught me nothing more than he could help.  He was one of those heartless, utterly selfish men that one meets too often in the business world.  I ought never to have been sent there, for my father had always an ill opinion of him; but he pretended a friendly interest in me—­just, I am convinced, to make the use of me that he did.’

He was silent, and began rowing again.

‘What happened them?’ asked Monica.

‘I mustn’t make out that I was a faultless boy,’ he continued, with the smile that graved wrinkles about his eyes; ’quite the opposite.  I had a good deal of my father’s temper; I often behaved very badly to my mother; what I needed was some stern but conscientious man to look after me and make me work.  In my spare time I lay about on the shore, or got into mischief with other boys.  It needed my mother’s death to make a more sensible fellow of me, and by that time it was too late.  I mean I was too old to be trained into profitable business habits.  Up to nineteen I had been little more than an errand and office boy, and all through the after years I never got a much better position.’

‘I can’t understand that,’ remarked Monica thoughtfully.

‘Why not?’

‘You seem to—­to be the kind of man that would make your way.’