``As a talker-out of inconvenient bills I should
be invaluable.''
THE HOUNDS OF FATE
In the fading light of a close dull autumn afternoon
Martin Stoner plodded his way along muddy lanes and
rut-seamed cart tracks that led he knew not exactly whither.
Somewhere in front of him, he fancied, lay the sea, and
towards the sea his footsteps seemed persistently turning;
why he was struggling wearily forward to that goal he could
scarcely have explained, unless he was possessed by the same
instinct that turns a hard-pressed stag cliffward in its
last extremity. In his case the hounds of Fate were
certainly pressing him with unrelenting insistence; hunger,
fatigue, and despairing hopelessness had numbed his brain,
and he could scarcely summon sufficient energy to wonder
what underlying impulse was driving him onward. Stoner was
one of those unfortunate individuals who seem to have tried
everything; a natural slothfulness and improvidence had
always intervened to blight any chance of even moderate
success, and now he was at the end of his tether, and there
was nothing more to try. Desperation had not awakened in
him any dormant reserve of energy; on the contrary, a mental
torpor grew up round the crisis of his fortunes.
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