A chill October squall was whistling through the trees--in Regent's
Park, stirring up the fallen leaves on the footpaths, and making the
nursemaids, as they listlessly trundled their perambulators, shiver
suddenly, and think of the nursery fire and the singing kettle on the
hob. The gathering clouds above sent the park-keeper off to his shed
for a waterproof, and emptied the carriage-drive of the vehicles in
which a few semi-grand people were taking an afternoon airing at half a
crown an hour. A little knot of small boys, intently playing football,
with piled-up jackets for goals, and an old parti-coloured "bouncer" for
a ball, were the last to take alarm at the lowering sky; nor was it till
the big drops fell in their midst that they scattered right and left,
and left the park empty.
No; not quite empty. One young man sat on through the rain on the seat
from which he had been watching the boys' game. A shabby, almost ragged
young man, with a disagreeable face and an almost contemptuous curl of
the lips, as the rain, gathering force every second, buffeted him in the
face and drenched him where he sat. There were a hundred seats more
sheltered than that on which he sat, and by walking scarcely fifty yards
he could have escaped the rain altogether. But he sat recklessly on,
and let the rain do its worst, his eyes still on the empty football
field, and his ears ringing still with the merry shouts of the departed
boys.
My reader, had he chanced to pass down that deserted walk on this stormy
afternoon, would hardly have recognised in the lonely occupant of that
seat the John Jeffreys he had seen six months ago at Clarges Street. It
was not merely that he looked haggard and ill, or that his clothes were
ragged. That was bad enough, but the reader has seen him in such a
plight before. But what he has not seen before--or if at all, only in
passing moments--is the bitter, hard look on his face, changing it
miserably. A stranger passing him that afternoon would have said--
"There sits a man who hates all the world."