Two years ago he was beset for a time with the same restlessness, and took night-walks in the same directions; the habit wore away, however.  Now it possessed him even more strongly.  Between ten and eleven o’clock, when the children were in bed, he fell into abstraction, and presently, with an unexpected movement, looked up as if some one had spoken to him—­just the look of one who hears a familiar voice; then he sighed, and took his hat and went forth.  It happened sometimes when he was sitting with his friends Mr. and Mrs. Eagles; in that case he would make some kind of excuse.  The couple suspected that his business would take him to the public-house, but John never came back with a sign about him of having drunk; of that failing he had broken himself.  He went cautiously down the atone stairs, averting his face if anyone met him; then by cross-ways he reached Gray’s Inn Road, and so westwards.

He had a well-ordered home, and his children were about him, but these things did not compensate him for the greatest loss his life had suffered.  The children, in truth, had no very strong hold upon his affections.  Sometimes, when Amy sat and talked to him, he showed a growing nervousness, an impatience, and at length turned away from her as if to occupy himself in some manner.  The voice was not that which had ever power to soothe him when it spoke playfully.  Memory brought back the tones which had been so dear to him, and at times something more than memory; he seemed really to hear them, as if from a distance.  And then it was that he went out to wander in the streets.

Of Bob in the meantime he saw scarcely anything.  That young man presented himself one Sunday shortly after his father had become settled in the new home, but practically he was a stranger.  John and he had no interests in common; there even existed a slight antipathy on the father’s part of late years.  Strangely enough this feeling expressed itself one day in the form of a rebuke to Bob for neglecting Pennyloaf—­Pennyloaf, whom John had always declined to recognise.

‘I hear no good of your goin’s on,’ remarked Hewett, on a casual encounter in the street.  ’A married man ought to give up the kind of company as you keep.’

‘I do no harm,’ replied Bob bluntly.  ’Has my wife been complaining to you?’

‘I’ve nothing to do with her; it’s what I’m told.’

’By Kirkwood, I suppose?  You’d better not have made up with him again, if he’s only making mischief.’

‘No, I didn’t mean Kirkwood.’

And John went his way.  Odd thing, was it not, that this embittered leveller should himself practise the very intolerance which he reviled in people of the upper world.  For his refusal to recognise Pennyloaf he had absolutely no grounds, save—­I use the words advisedly—­an aristocratic prejudice.  Bob had married deplorably beneath him; it was unpardonable, let the character of the girl be what it might.  Of course you recognise the item in John Hewett’s personality which serves to explain this singular attitude.  But, viewed generally, it was one of those bits of human inconsistency over which the observer smiles, and which should be recommended to good people in search of arguments for the equality of men.