Percival's utter disappearance was a nine days' wonder in Fordborough, and when curiosity was dying out it flamed up again on the discovery that the marriage was not only put off, but was off altogether. This fact, considered in connection with the old squire's will, gave rise to the idea that there was something queer about Mr. Percival Thorne--that he had been found out at the last moment, and had lost both wife and legacy in consequence. "No doubt it was hushed up on condition he should take himself off. The best thing they could do, but how sad for an old county family! Still, there will be black sheep, and what a mercy it was that Miss Langton was saved from him!" So people talked, and generally added that they could not tell why--just a feeling, you know--but they never had liked that Percival Thorne.
In September, Godfrey Hammond cut a tiny slip out of the _Times_ and sent it to the banished man: "On the 15th, the wife of Horace Thorne, Esq., Brackenhill, Fordborough, of a son."
Percival ate his breakfast that morning with the scrap of paper by his plate, and looked at it with fierce, defiant eyes. Lottie was avenged indeed--she would never know how bitterly. He had sworn that he would never think of Brackenhill, yet without his knowledge it had been the background to his thoughts of everything. And now the cruel injustice of his fate had taken a new lease of life in this baby boy: it would outlive him, it would become eternal. Percival leapt to his feet with a short laugh: "Well, that's over and done with! Good luck to the poor little fellow! he's innocent enough. And I don't suppose he'll ever know what a scoundrel his father was." So saying, he glanced at his watch and marched off to his work.
Those three months had left their trace on him. He loathed his life; he had no companions, no hope; he was absorbed in the effort to endure his suffering. His indolence made his daily labor hateful as the treadmill. He was fastidious, and his surroundings sickened him. His food disgusted him, and so did the close atmosphere of the office. But he had chosen his fate, and he had no heart to try to escape from it, since it gave him the means of keeping body and soul together. Day after day, as that hot September wore away, he looked out on a dreary range of roofs and chimney-pots. He learned to know and hate every broken tile. From his bedroom he looked into a narrow back yard, deep like a well, at the bottom of which children swarmed, uncleanly and unwholesome, and women gossiped and wrangled as they hung out dingy rags to dry. The fierce sun shone on it all, and on Percival as he leant at his window surveying it with disgust, yet something of fascination too. "I fancied the sun wouldn't seem so bright in holes like this," he mused. "I thought everything would be dull and dim. Instead of which, he glares into every cranny and corner, as if he were pointing at all the filth and squalid misery, and makes it ten times more abominable." Nor did the slanting rays light up anything pleasant and fresh in the bedroom itself. It was shabby and small, with coarsely-papered walls and a discolored ceiling. Percival remarked that his window had a very wide sill. He never found out the reason, unless it were intended that he should take the air by sitting on it and dangling his legs over the foulest of water-butts. But when night came the broad sill was the favorite battlefield for all the cats in the neighborhood. It might have been pointed out as readily as they point you out the place where the students fight at Heidelberg.