Explore "False Evidence" by E. Phillips Oppenheim on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
During the next four years of my life there happened to me not one single incident worth recording. Our home had been broken up, and we had left Devonshire for ever. My father and mother were living abroad at a small country town in the south of France, Marian was at a boarding-school at Weymouth, and I -- I was articled clerk to a very respectable firm of land agents and surveyors in Exeter.
To say that I was contented would be false, but, on the other hand, I was not absolutely miserable. The out-of-door life suited me, and I did not find the work unpleasant. But apart from that I was by no means satisfied. Day and night I carried with me the pale, unhappy face of my poor father, his proud spirit continually being lashed and mortified by the disgrace which falsely rested upon him. I thought of him wandering about in a foreign country, exiled from his proper place in the world, from the society of his fellows, from all things which men of his kind most esteem. I thought of him bearing always in his mind those cruel words of his father's, "Out of my house and out of my heart," and it seemed to me a disgrace that I should be leading a humdrum life in a quiet country town, instead of throwing all my heart and energies into the task which I had placed before me as a sacred mission. But how was I to commence it?