The reader may imagine that the walk our two heroes took Citywards that
Monday morning was not a very cheerful one. It seemed like walking out
of one life into another. Behind, like a dream, were the joyous, merry
days spent at Garden Vale and Wilderham, with no care for the future,
and no want for the present. Before them, still more like a dream, lay
the prospect of their new work, with all its anxiety, and drudgery, and
weariness, and the miserable eighteen shillings a week it promised them;
and, equally wretched at the present moment, there was the vision of
their desolate mother, alone in the Dull Street lodgings, where they had
just left her, unable at the last to hide the misery with which she saw
her two boys start out into the pitiless world.