Explore "The Mill of Silence" by Bernard Capes on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Long after the storm had broken and rolled away were we still sitting talking in the dim lamplight. In these hours I learned what dark confidences my friend had to give me as to his solitary and haunted past; learned more truly, also, than I had ever done as yet, the value of a moral courage that had enabled him, dogged by the cruelest hate of adversity, to emerge from the furnace noble and thrice refined.
He had been picked up, as a mere child drowning in the river, by the Thames police and had been ultimately consigned to a charity school, from which, in due course, he had been apprenticed to a printer. Thus far had his existence, emerging from profoundest gloom, run a straight and uneventful course -- but before?