famous. He felt he had made little sacrifice when he wrote to the artist saying he could not take his offer, but accepted his fate with scarcely a murmur.
"We are like the leaves upon the river of life," he would say—"we go with the waters."
III
For twelve years Henry plodded on slowly in his office. Not being clever, he stayed but by his employer's indulgence, and at home he was seldom recognised as one of themselves by his brothers and sisters. The noisy, commonplace boys and girls let the dreamer pass amongst them unnoticed. He kept the roof above them, but they gave him no credit for that. He might have done so much more. He dwelt in the midst of them, and never realized how bored he was by the commonplace. Two of the girls married men with moderate means, and then the mother died. The second son got a clerkship in a bank. And one day the youngest came to Henry, and spoke to him in a manner so unusually kind that Henry guessed
