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Updated: June 5, 2025
Could such a world exist and be liable as his own to It? Could the same brutal touch destroy this fabric and the sordid privacies of Prospect Place all in a run like a row of card-houses? "Never you mind 'im, Mister Gilbart," said a voice at his elbow, and he turned and looked in the face of a girl who, in an interval of dressmaking, had once helped him with his district work. "Him?"
Though he delivered them without manuscript, Gilbart always prepared his addresses carefully and kept the fair copies in his desk. He lived in hope of being reported some day, and then who could say but a book might be called for?
At nine o'clock next morning a sentry on the seaward side of Tregantle Fort saw a man sitting below in the sunshine on the edge of the cliff, and took him for a tramp. It was John Gilbart. He had spent the night trudging the streets, but always returning to the pavement in front of one or the other of the two important newspaper offices.
Outside the theatre door in the great portico Gilbart flung up both hands and let out a long, shuddering sigh. "My! What's the matter with you?" asked Milly. "Come along and have some supper." He led her to a supper-room. "Well, you do know how to do things," she said. But it frightened her when he ordered champagne. She looked at him nervously.
The cottages were required by the fresh comers, and Mrs Gilbart, with her son and her little girl Mary, a year younger than Mark, would have been compelled to go forth houseless and penniless into the cold world, had not an uncle of her late husband, a hewer at a pit a few miles away, offered to receive her and her children into his house.
Gilbart considered himself an Imperialist, read his newspaper religiously, and had shown great loyalty as secretary of a local sub-committee at the time of the Queen's Jubilee, in collecting subscriptions among the dockyardsmen. Habitually he felt a lump in his throat when he spoke of the Flag. To his thinking every yacht in the Sound should have dipped her flag to the Berenice.
While John Gilbart read this there was silence in the stuffy little room, and for some minutes after. Then he stepped to the mantelpiece for the match-box and candle. A small ormolu clock ticked there, and while he groped for the matches he put out a hand to stop the noise, which had suddenly grown intolerable. He desisted, remembering that he did not know how the clock worked that Mrs.
"Have any of you seen John Gilbart and his boy Mat?" she asked of those who had come out of the pit and of others standing by. No one could give her any information about her husband, though one had replied that he had seen young Gilbart leaving the trap at which he had been stationed.
The same scene was again enacted, and the rescued now reported that there were more to follow, though how many they could not tell. Little Mark and his mother waited with trembling hearts. Those they longed to see had not appeared, and to their anxious inquiries no satisfactory reply was given. Neither John Gilbart nor his son had been seen.
The back of the chair was turned toward the window, but over it Gilbart could see the crown of a grey head and small, steady puffs of smoke ascending between it and the upper edge of the paper. A light appeared in the room above; the light of a candle behind the drawn blind. It lasted there perhaps for ten minutes, and once the woman's shadow moved across the blind.
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