So absorbed was he in thought
undefined, and so sunk in anxiety as to the answer he was about to
receive, that more than once he was nearly run over by the cart of some
reckless tradesman--seeming to him, in its over-taking suddenness, the
type of prophetic fate already at his heels.
At length, however, he arrived safe in the outer shop, where the books
of the firm were exposed to sight, in process of being subscribed for by
the trade. There a pert young man asked him to take a seat, while he
carried his name to the publisher, and there for some time he waited,
reading titles he found himself unable to lay hold of; and there, while
he waited, the threatened rain began, and, ere he was admitted to the
inner premises, such a black deluge came pouring down as, for blackness
at least, comes down nowhere save in London. With this accompaniment, he
was ushered at length into a dingy office, deep in the recesses of the
house, where a young man whom he saw for the first time had evidently,
while Hector waited in the shop, been glancing at the manuscript he had
left. Little as he could have read, however, it had been enough, aided
perhaps by the weather, to bring him to an unfavorable decision; his
rejection was precise and definite, leaving no room for Hector to say
anything, for he did not seem ever to have heard of him before. Hector
rose at once, gathered up his papers from the table where they lay
scattered, said "Good-morning," and went out into the sooty rain.
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