There were no letters
for him on the board in the hallway, and he sauntered up
to the Strand. As by force of habit, he turned presently
into a side-street, and stopped opposite the ancient
book-shop of his family.
In the bright yet mellow light of the sunny autumn noontide,
the blacks and roans and smoked drabs of the low old
brick front looked more dingy to his eye than ever.
It spoke of antiquity, no doubt, but it was a dismal and
graceless antiquity of narrow purposes and niggling thrift.
It was so little like the antiquity, for example,
of Hadlow House, that the two might have computed their
age by the chronological systems of different planets.
Although his sister's married name was Dabney, and she
had been sole proprietor for nearly a dozen years,
the sign over the doorway bore still its century-old legend,
"Thorpe, Bookseller."
He crossed the street, and paused for a moment to run
an eye over the books and placards exposed on either
side of the entrance. A small boy guarded these wares,
and Thorpe considered him briefly, with curious recollections
of how much of his own boyhood had been spent on that
very spot. The lad under observation had a loutish
and sullen face; its expression could not have been more
devoid of intellectual suggestions if he had been posted
in a Wiltshire field to frighten crows with a rattle,
instead of being set here in the highway of the world's
brain-movement, an agent of students and philosophers.
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