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 "Nothing—only she made a face like I smelt bad, the old trout!"

"Don't mind her, my dear. She can't help sniffing at any woman who isn't strictly guaranteed."

"I'll bet she's not so hostile toward men."

"No, with them she requires rather a different sort of guarantee."

"What sort?"

"They must be warranted to say discreetly flattering things in public and make love to her in private, to put cushions under her feet, imply that she is young and fresh, instead of middle-aged and faded, amuse and bully her, compliment and insult her, and accept her manifold favours with grateful thanks."

"And do you pass the acid test?"

"Now who's asking personal questions?"

Gritty watched him over the rim of her coffee-cup. In her regard there was a trace of maternal solicitude.

"Why don't you drop this game, Paul?" she finally said. "You're a darn sight too good for it."

"What game?"

"Oh, I've got eyes. Why do you let yourself be squabbled over by third-rate women?"

Paul laughed at the vindictive sincerity of her tone. "I'm making excellent use of them."

"What do you get out of it?"

"Introductions, market tips, food, drink, and miscellaneous information."

"In return for?"

"Carefully weighed and measured doles of my external personality."

"And what good does the information do you?"

"The same kind of good that food does you when you're hungry. I've always been a glutton for experience, and experience is like Mohammed's mountain."

Gritty was not satisfied, but her eyes had been drawn

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 toward the doorway again and an odd grimace came over her face. She glanced quickly at Paul and he turned to see a tall young man entering the room. It was the bashful Earl whom he had brought to Gritty on the night of the dance.

"I guessed right about the nice boy," Paul had time to whisper, before Freddy joined them.

"But only half right," she returned enigmatically.

"I'm looking for a stray aunt," Freddy said, covering his embarrassment with an inconsequential tone. "Have you seen one?"

"She's gone upstairs," Paul informed him. "She was looking for a book, I believe—a green one."

"Why will they persist in reading green books?" said Freddy, to make talk.

Gritty laughed. "Why, are green books bad for you here, too, then, like green vegetables?"

A few minutes later Gritty rose. "I got to go tuck Joe in," she said. "He wouldn't sleep a wink unless I said good night."

She shook hands with Freddy, whose eyes dwelt on her with a strange sort of devotion. "It's good-bye, now," she said. "For I'm off in the morning. Good-bye and good luck."

Paul thought she was carrying the sham unnecessarily far, until he scrutinized Freddy's face. Beneath the casual mask he detected unhappiness. Then he glanced at Gritty, as she ran up the stairs. Like all women, she had a way of springing surprises.

Freddy lit a cigarette and came to the side of the piano. Something was troubling him. "I say, Minas," he began anxiously, "I hope I didn't intrude just now."

Paul turned back to the keyboard. He had been fumbling over difficult passages in a Debussy prelude: "La lune descend sur le temple qui fut."

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 freckles and throw stones," he explained. "We're still children in each other's eyes. So you haven't intruded in any sense, I assure you."

Freddy sat down in the chair abandoned by Gritty.

"She approves of you most emphatically, if it interests you to know," Paul added.

"Really?" Freddy's face lit up. "She's a splendid woman," he testified, with an air of experience which, like his evening clothes, merely accentuated his boyishness.

"Oh, Gritty's a peach," Paul agreed.

"Peach! Peach? You people have an amazing vocabulary." He got up and announced his intention of turning in.

"Good-night," said Paul, and smiled discreetly.

Freddy gave him a sidelong glance, then shook his head. "Hasn't she told you?" he asked. "I imagined, from what you said, that she had."

Paul was puzzled. "I've done a bit of guessing, that's all. Rather nosey of me."

Freddy took a note from his pocket. "No harm to let you read this. Only shows what an ass I've been."

Paul hesitated, then took the note.

"Poor Early-bird—that didn't catch any worm," he read. "It was horrid of me to tease you the other day at tea, and very bold of you to come back after you promised not to. Of course I like you a lot but don't you see that's just why I can't! Take my tip, Freddy dear, and don't chase after girls like me. You're such a pet, and it would spoil you. I mean it. G K."

Paul handed back the note. He was ashamed of himself for having misjudged Gritty's intentions.

"Were you hard hit?" he ventured to inquire.

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 Freddy's boyishness fell away, and a wry smile crossed his face. "Well, as a matter of fact, I was, rather. Makes a man feel an infernal rotter to get a decent note like this after having assumed—well, you know."

Freddy had taken Gritty at her own easy valuation, and his superior worth had put her on her mettle. It had been a good lesson for both, Paul mused.

"Splendid woman," Freddy repeated, and said good-night.

Suddenly Paul felt more poignantly alone than he had felt for years. Twice in the course of a few hours, Gritty Kestrell—that little baggage—had revealed qualities that chastened him. He thought of himself as a shell, stuffed with words, words, words, light as a meringue.

The doors of the hotel had been fastened. He went to the switch and turned down the last lights, leaving the lounge in darkness except for the red reflection of the dying fire and the blue moonlight at the windows. He had an impulse to put on his top coat and wander back to the desert, to wait for sunrise. But as he walked to the windows his feet, against the sides of his shoes, ached in protest.

Instinctively he moved toward the piano, and for the first time in years dropped into the tranquil rhythm of the old sonata he had played in Fremantle. As he played he was conscious of the phenomenon concerning which he had philosophized earlier in the evening: that a watching faculty stood aloof and described his lonely mood for him, a faculty which there was no escaping. It told him his life was still aimless. The theme had not changed, but he had missed opportunities of developing it, had been content to luxuriate in mere tone-colour. Others went on year by year lending their voices to the great chorus, while his life remained a feeble solo, at times inaudible even to himself. On a few occasions,

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 when there had been a lull in the chorus and the world had held its breath, his solo had welled up clear, spontaneous, full, until he had throbbed with the conviction that it dominated the universe. But almost immediately other voices had risen to drown it.

Even the theme of the third movement of the old sonata—a theme he had once identified with his own ego—was only musically and poetically valid. At any rate valid only for a Beethoven, never for a Paul Minas.

He closed the piano, went to sit by the fire, and lit a final cigarette. He thought of his haphazard acquaintances and what they were making of their lives. He wondered, once more, what would have become of him had he never run away to sea. Suddenly he yearned to see the village where he had lived as a child, yearned to revisit the old kitchen, the old playroom, and the fields where he and Gritty had looked for moss-beds they called "secrets." In the firelight he recaptured the old sights and sounds, heard the skates clinking on his shoulder and voices echoing across the frosty marsh. He saw the cherry-tree white with snow, and again white with blossoms. He heard Walter Dreer's familiar whistle and felt his heart beat faster at its summons—a summons he couldn't accept, because he had to practise. He saw Phœbe Meddar standing in the pale morning sun, ivory and gold and lavender, saw her stoop to pick up a bunch of tea-roses. And he yearned to see Phœbe again, the Phœbe whom Gritty had found—on one of her triumphal re-entries into Hale's Turning—teaching school. For his idealization of Phœbe, Gritty had mocked him a little, but tenderly. "At least," she had admitted, "Phœbe's the only girl left in that God-forsaken hole with a nickel's worth of brains."

Gritty had turned up as a sort of "distant" sister. She had shown a disposition to mother rather than flirt with him, which was as it should be. And now she was up-

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 stairs, perhaps a little lonely herself, whilst, a few doors away, Joe Krauss slept the sleep of the complaisant. In a few hours Gritty would be on her festive way, and Freddy, in white polo togs, would gallop back to the stern business of life!

And somewhere overhead Cora, poor amateur courtesan, Cora who was almost lovely, almost brilliant, almost a lot of things, Cora whose life just perceptibly flatted, but whose timbre was quite above the average, Cora was sitting up in bed—perhaps reading a green book. Her door would open if he chose to knock—but he did not so choose. He had no more thresholds to cross in Egypt.

He went direct to his room and sat on the window-sill watching the moon, as he had done one night four or five years before in a tiny farm cottage in California. As on that occasion his mind was tinged with memories of the village where he had spent his childhood. The time had come for the prodigal to return.

His decision once taken, Paul set about making definite plans to bring this latest phase of his career to a close. Again he experienced the sensation of taking a new turning in a maze. Into his mind came an echo of a phrase long-forgotten: Aunt Verona's sigh of "God, what a labyrinth, labyrinth, labyrinth!" He was grown-up now, and could say "God" as much as he chose. He could even find it in his heart to wish he had some one to place an occasional check on his weary licences, some one to hold up a finger and reproach him with a "Why, Paul Minas, if you say things like that I shall stop my ears!" That was what Beatie Markwick said to Pat, and Pat doted on it.

Gritty, by flitting across his path like a golden moth, had roused him from one day-dream—a day-dream that had lasted now for two and a half years—and focused his attention on another: a day-dream whose setting was

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 the far-away village whence Gritty, like himself, had fled. He would go back to Hale's Turning and pick up the threads left hanging there. The next movement in the unending symphony would be written over the first, but less naïve, more experienced, "like the same person thirteen years later."

Breaking the news to Pat was a painful ordeal. He could advance no reason but caprice for his impending desertion; for that matter caprice had prompted his acceptance of Pat's offer at the outset. And, although the Irishman could understand a sentimental desire to revisit one's native land, he could not understand Paul's readiness "to throw up a sure thing" on such frivolous grounds as mere "fed-upness." Pat began by arguing, and ended by preaching, his text being "Success, and what you must do to achieve it in this most practical of all possible worlds."

"We got a chance to make a wunnerful thing out o' this here concern," he concluded. "You've helped do the spade work, and if you don't stay to help reap the harvest, why, you're plumb crazy, son, that's all I got to say."

Paul laughed, but with a nice regard for the affection that underlay Pat's fulminations. "I told you in the beginning I was crazy," he reminded his friend. "The word I used was 'quixotic,' but it amounts to the same thing."

Pat groaned. "Well, for the love of Mike stop bein' it, while there's still time."

Paul grew suddenly grave. The words called up out of the past an echo of some admonition made by Dr. Wilcove to Aunt Verona. Something about shirking the issues of life, and about giving life a trial before it was too late. He let the comparison drop, and Pat went on preaching.

"Take a holiday if you like. Go home and see your folks, but come back and we'll run the joint together

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 see—we'll double the staff and put it on a real money-making basis."

"Money bores me," said Paul.

Pat exploded. "Be a bloody pauper then—and to hell with you!"

Paul sat staring into space.

"I hate to let you be so doggone fat-headed," Pat came back to the charge. "Gee, if I had your style, why I'd just about run Egypt. There ain't a thing we couldn't pull off here, if you stuck around. Where do you think you'll finally get off at if you go on chuckin' up chances like you been doin' all your life? Why nowhere—that's where it'll be. It's plain suicide."

"If life consists in wheedling orders out of tight-fisted merchants," Paul proclaimed, with a return of his cynical humour, "then I prefer suicide. Failure is more interesting than success; for there's only one way to succeed and there are a thousand picturesque ways of failing. . . . Besides, you have Beatie now. She'll take my place."

Pat had an idea. "Listen here sonny," he said, as though offering a bait that no sane man would resist. "Why don't you stay and marry Ivy Markwick? Beatie and I were talking about it. Ivy'd jump at it."

"I don't want to be jumped at," retorted Paul with a trace of petulance. "Nor clung to."

Pat's efforts were in vain, and a month later he drove Paul to the railway station in the shiny car. "Well, if you change your mind any," said Pat in farewell, "just send me a cable."

Pat's debonair bearing had given place to dejection. With a pang Paul realized that Pat's attitude, ever since the moment he had warned him against the raw tomato, had been, however clumsily, protective. He would surely miss Pat's remonstrances and rebukes, his prudence and indulgence, his thoughtful attentions, his brotherly coun-

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 sel, his abusive banter, his honest gaucheries. Another phrase from the past came back to him. Life was a series of partial deaths; and as one grew older it would be less easy to create new enthusiasms to fill the gaps left by the demise of the old.

In his ears was the solemn accompaniment to the fortune-telling scene of Carmen.

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was well provided with funds, but as a tribute to his abandoned avocation he resolved to work his way to America. Through his dealings with exporters in Alexandria he obtained, after a short period of waiting, a berth as substitute officer on an oil tank bound for New York.

Thence, after calling on Gritty Kestrell, who was in the throes of rehearsals for Krauss's summer production, he proceeded to Boston, crossed by boat to Yarmouth, and made his way to Hale's Turning in an ambling train whose old-fashioned lamps and yellow plush seats called forth a legion of forgotten associations.

Schooners in muddy creeks, glimpses of the sparkling Bay of Fundy, wooden houses and red barns, trees heavy with green apples, stations with their quotas of staring, gaping, hard-voiced villagers and canopied carriages, broad dusty roads shaded by maples, the compactness of the turf, the carpets of clover, daisies, buttercups and dandelions, the cobalt blue of the sky, the cotton-white of the clouds, the leisurely pastoral quality of the whole passing scene, caused him an exquisite pain. As he drew nearer to his destination—the squalling sticky-handed children, the smell of oranges!—his throat grew dry and he caught himself biting his nails in nervous agitation. He longed to see his home, could scarcely wait—yet dreaded it, dreaded it. He felt shy. Rh

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 It was the first of July, 1914—Dominion Day—and all along the road were signs of celebration. Houses were decorated with flags, families from outlying districts thronged the streets of the villages in festive attire. PaudPaul [sic] had an indulgent smile for the cow-hide boots emerging beneath muslin frocks, up in front and down at the back after the manner of soil-tilling women the world over. Kind-faced, shapeless mothers carried picnic baskets on their arms and solid unbrellasumbrellas [sic], and fat boys in duck knickers, with hat elastics under their chins, blew gaudy horns, sucking peppermint sticks between fanfares.

Paul thought of the days when he awoke at dawn, excited at the prospect of marching in the First of July parade. He saw no sign of the "brownies" and burnt-cork "minstrels" who had been a conspicuous feature of former parades, and a lamentable modern touch was added by the prevalence of Ford motor-cars, of which the world had been innocent in his childhood.

A poignant sense of his foreignness was borne in on him. When he had to consult the conductor, whom he unthinkingly addressed as "Guard," he felt as though they spoke different languages. Certainly the conductor scrutinized him as something out of the ordinary in passengers.

To cast off his depression Paul tried to think himself back into his childish state of mind, only to be faced with the truth that he had been a stranger even as a boy. He was suffused by the familiar sense of being in the wrong, of being unlike his, of being in the same camp as Aunt Verona, who was condemned as anti-social.

His ! He wondered how many were still in Hale's Turning, and how many would remember him, even by name.

When the train drew up, he timidly scanned the figures

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 on the platform, and his heart leaped as he recognized two or three which had long been consigned to oblivion. In a distant group was a man who squinted; with a shudder of compunction Paul recognized Bean-Oh, whose eye he had damaged with his umbrella, twenty years since. And there, walking down the platform with a mail bag on his bent, green shoulders, was old Silas, the postmaster—spitting tobacco juice at regular intervals. Old Silas who kept a shop where Paul and Walter Dreer had spent their weekly allowance on chocolate "dudes" and liquorice whips, old Silas who had pumped the organ in the days before Dr. Wilcove had persuaded the congregation to install water power, old Silas who had seemed venerable and hoary thirteen years ago, but who couldn't be more than sixty even now! Paul stood beside his hand-bags, and the postmaster moved on without a hint of recognition in his watery eyes.

A lanky fellow, in overalls, "one of the Wigginses," to judge by a generalized family likeness, was standing beside an empty cart.

"Can you take these bags and my trunks to the hotel for me?" Paul asked.

"What hotel?"

"Mr. Fraser's," Paul replied. The name came to him along with the familiar sights and smells. "I didn't know there was any other."

"Cance Fraser's been dead two year," said the youth in a tone which made Paul feel the weight of his ignorance.

"Then what's happened to the hotel?"

"Nothin.'Nothin'. [sic] Only Fred Matthews runs it now. Stayin' long, Mister?"

"I haven't decided yet."

"What you sellin'—books?"

"No." Paul resented the familiarity, though he recognized in it a token of respect. The yokel's way of show-

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 ing approval was to ask personal questions. "I'll walk ahead, if you'll bring the luggage." He turned down a broad road into the village, avoiding the eyes of passersby. It was late afternoon and he felt he could not face his townsmen until twilight had fallen. He needed an hour or two behind closed doors to get used to being at home.

At the hotel, which was merely an overgrown private dwelling, Paul signed the register as "P. W. Minas." The name evoked no sign of interest on the part of his landlord, who seemed bored at the necessity of attending to a guest. Paul realized that, for the first time in his life, he was being incuriously taken for granted "as one of them Minases from Bridgetown way," and he mounted the stairs to his linoleum carpeted room with a whimsical sense of anticlimax. He had, he mused, a positive genius for anticlimax.

Dinner turned out to be a humble early meal called "supper," which he ate in solitude. He had washed off the grime of his travels and, for the sake of comfort, changed into a tweed sport suit. Daylight still lingered as he left the broad veranda of the hotel and passed through the gate into Prince William Road, which stretched up the hill under a luxuriant roof of maples toward an orange and scarlet sky.

Avoiding the knot of people before the combined post office, barber shop and town hall, he walked slowly along a overrun with clover. At the widely-separated gates, bushes of syringa, laden with cream-coloured blossoms, gave forth a sweet, heavy perfume. Amongst the grass he detected long-forgotten flowers, nameless purple clusters which Gritty, with her melodramatic imagination, had once sworn were "poison," and a little

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 yellow and orange blossom which they had called "butter and eggs." There was also a vague scent of strawberries, wholesomely exotic in nostrils attuned to tropical gardens.

A black dog, scandalized by Paul's English tweeds, came running out to protest against his existence, and Paul could only concur, which sent the dog away in snorting disgust. The faces of the small girl and boy who admonished him with unheeded orders of "Lie down, Smut," were dimly familiar. Finally he placed them as "some of the Hornbys." Perhaps Miss Hornby had got married and "had" them!

His heart beat fast and his hands grew cold as he approached the end of the road. Then suddenly it stood before him: a square house, sadly in need of repair, set far back in an unkempt garden. A sentinel elm—the one in which his kite had fouled—had been struck by lightning, and a dead bough hung, half severed. Tears blurred his sight, but consternation dried them. For this house was almost little, and for thirteen years he had thought of it as "Aunt Verona's big, bare house." Bare it most assuredly was—but, oh, pitifully, not big!

Only one tiger lily was left to bear witness to the old profusion, and long grass grew to the very walls. Windows were boarded up, fences half rotted.

He walked to the side of the house and was surprised to see a neat pile of and other signs of habitation. The face of a woman whom he recognized as the village yeastmaker appeared at the kitchen window.

He knocked and learned that Mrs. Barker was employed to live in two rooms as caretaker for the owner, who was in foreign parts.

"Paul Minas?" he suggested, and she agreed that that was "the party."

"Did Dr. Wilcove place you in charge?" he asked.

"No. I come after the doctor died. The other trustee,

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 Mr. Kingsley—he lives in Halifax—come down to fix it all up."

So Dr. Wilcove was dead. Paul was saddened at this news, for he had looked forward to paying off his long moral obligation to the guardian whom he had ignored. He had also looked forward to asking Dr. Wilcove numerous questions about Aunt Verona—questions that hadn't occurred to him as a boy. He stood ruminating, as Mrs. Barker held the door half open, with an air of distrust mingled with deference and curiositycuriosity. [sic]

Paul couldn't leave without having entered the house. "I'm Paul Minas," he announced. "Don't you remember me, Mrs. Barker? Miss Windell used to send me to buy yeast from you."

She was startled, then gave a cry of recognition. "Glory be! Why, if you ain't the very dead spit of old Captain Andrew! Well I never! And me takin' you for a summer visitor from Boston."

She invited him in, and he sat for a while in the old kitchen, ruined for him by Mrs. Barker's fussy attempts to make it comfortable. She was the sort of body who saved newspapers and bits of string in case they might "come in handy," which they didn't. And she adorned every object with knitted woollen mats or bows of "baby-ribbon."

It was the first time he had set foot within the kitchen since Aunt Verona had left it, and he felt her loss more poignantly now than he had done in the beginning. Life in Hale's Turning without Aunt Verona to interpret it was like music played on a dumb clavier.

"Nobody could find out where you was," Mrs. Barker finally explained. "Some said you was dead. So they decided to store all the stuff in the parlour and dining-room. I make a fire in there every off and on and keep it dusted. The roof's bad, and the chimneys ain't up to much."

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 Paul was bitterly disappointed. He had unreasonably counted on finding his bedroom walls adorned with the old prints of Queen Victoria and Sir John Macdonald. He craved the musty smell of the rag barrel and the box of lump sugar in the attic. Even the playroom was desecrated. The piano had been moved out to make room for Mrs. Barker's bed.

He walked away from the house, turning up the road. Mr. Kestrell's windmill creaked faintly in response to the evening breeze, and a light shone at the kitchen window. He had a desire to run in and greet the mother of the famous star—but refrained. He must make a complete tour of the village before paying calls.

The schoolyard showed traces of the "programme of athletic sports," and the "greased pig contest" that had been held there in the afternoon. Peanut shells and empty popcorn packets abounded. Eager children were already beginning to gather for "the grand fireworks display." As he passed he heard one urchin whisper: "Hey, skinny, look at the dude!" He was amused to learn that the supply of young "skinnies" had not given out. He presumed there were still "fatties," and "Scotties," and "shrimps."

A dusty motor-car in front of Walter's gate bore witness to the continued prosperity of the Dreers. The dark-red Ashmill house far beyond the hedge of rusty cedars was provincially august.

Finally the Baptist church, wooden,. Its spire had once appeared to him the loftiest point in the world! He walked up the gravel avenue. A branch of an old acacia tree still brushed the window next to the Meddar pew. In imagination, he could smell the stale odour of leather-bound hymnbooks and red rep cushions, could hear the thud of the organ lid as he pushed it over the keys, the muffled rush of air as old Silas turned on the water power. He could even remember the num-

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 bers of some of the hymns: 103, "Crown Him"; 99, "When He Cometh!" Gee-rusalem!

As he turned into the road again from the churchyard, which smelt unmistakably of trampled strawberries, he saw a white-clad figure coming down the hill. It was a woman of fifty odd, slender, neat, a little dowdy, but exuding an air of timid allégresse that appealed to him. He would have recognized her had he met her in Zanzibar, for she had not changed, except to grow dryer. She was imperishable. One day a wind would, tout simplement, bear her away out of life, and she would primly draw down her skirts as she soared. She might have been made of tissue-paper. He took off his cap and stood barring the way, and she looked up, myopically, with a blush mantling her faded cheeks. She scarcely came up to his shoulder, and he remembered a Sunday morning when she had had to kneel down to knot his plaid Windsor tie for him.

"You don't recognize me, I'm afraid, Miss Todd."

She narrowed her eyes with diffident deliberation, then said: "No, I'm afraid I don't seem to."

"Of course," Paul sympathized. "On Dominion Day one sees such quantities of strangers."

"My memory is bad, I fear."

"Oh, don't say that. For if you fail to remember me I'll run away again and die of grief. And we were such good friends once. I had a habit of playing your accompaniments too fast, but you were very sweet about it."

Miss Todd stepped back, hesitated, then broke out, "You're never little Paul Minas."

"No—big Paul." To prove it he lifted her, kissed her gently and set her on her feet again.

Gurgling Gertrude was speechless, then voluble, and Paul stood answering her questions for several minutes. He found it more difficult to give an account of himself

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 than he had anticipated, for nothing he might say could explain to Miss Todd how he had acquired the finish which, as he could see, stamped him in her eyes as high-toned to a degree. That she approved of him was evident from her way of saying:

"Well, I always declared you'd grow up a perfect wonder."

In reply to his inquiries Miss Todd informed him, with becoming modesty, but undisguised elation, that she hadn't missed a day at Sunday School for fifteen years. She had been presented with a red-letter Bible in token of her faithfulness.

"Good God!" exclaimed Paul, then caught himself. The "swear word" had slipped out despite his instinctive effort to attune himself to the piety and sobriety of his surroundings. More than ever he realized the force of Aunt Verona's admonition.

She suggested that he should accompany her to Mrs. Dreer's where there was to be a "party," but he excused himself, agreeing to call on Miss Todd the next afternoon and "stay to supper."

"What hot weather we're having!" she remarked as they parted. She would have been horrified on arriving at Mrs. Dreer's to think that she had forgotten this evidence of savoir-faire.

"Yes," he agreed. "But if you're used to living in the East, the heat is rather pleasant." By "East" he meant "The Orient," and after saying it he realized that for Miss Todd "East" connoted "The Maritime provinces." Already he had found that his mode of thinking, as well as his vocabulary, would have to be overhauled for navigation in these backwaters of civilization.

Miss Todd bowed and smiled, then walked on, a shade more primly, a shade more tremulously, but with an ineffable and appealing jauntiness. She was still wearing her Jubilee sovereign.

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 The village was re-awakening for the evening festivities. Farmers in for the day were removing nose-bags from horses' heads, whilst their wives tucked baskets into the clumsy waggons. To avoid them, Paul walked towards the marshes, crossed the trestle and made his way to the. Ravaged by the ardours of the July sun, the sky was drawing blue veils across its pallid face. At the deserted shipyard, which presumably belonged to him, Paul sat on a broken keel and gazed across the river towards the mill.

Not a vessel was in port, though a clumsy tug, taking advantage of the tide from the Basin, was puffing her way around the bend with two empty white scows to be laden with gypsum. Poor little mud-red river, in which his forefathers had cast anchor on portentous arrivals from Saint Nazaire, Cienfuegos, Rotterdam, Madras. They had all "sold their farms to go to sea," and for their pains had died of yellow fever, or foundered, or become obliterated in far ends of the earth. Like himself that ghostly legion had been familiar with forepeaks and caustic, scraping irons and oakum, lime juice, salt "horse," and icy shrouds that rattled to the macabre tune of Atlantic gales. From them he had inherited a dauntlessness of spirit, a need to navigate the bounding main of thought and feeling, a hatred of staying put. But from vague sources that had persisted from the days when Nova Scotia was Acadie, a fraction of what Voltaire disdainfully called (and it was rather a gaffe) quelques arpents de neige, he had inherited traits of a different order. To him, as to Aunt Verona, had been bequeathed artistic heirlooms, and he was at times chilled with the fear that he had inherited a share of the fatalism that had blighted his aunt's career.

From the keel on which he was mounted he could see in the clear air of gathering night a sharp silhouette of Evangeline's Blomidon, and it was an easy boat-run

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 to the beach on which the sentimental lovers were separated. His French ancestor, though dispossessed, had returned—for what? To be disillusioned, as usual. He sat musing until it was dark, then made his way stumblingly toward the abandoned wharf.

Near the overhanging bluff, after a sharp ascent, he came opposite the cottage of Phœbe Meddar. He walked around it from a safe distance, as he had done eighteen years before, when his inamorata lay mortally ill of an overindulgence in cucumbers and milk.

Some one was coming out of the cottage, and he turned away, striking out across the fields towards the village.

In his cheerless lodging he was unable to compose himself for sleep. After a vain attempt to read, he rose and paced the room. Finally he sat down, with some vague notion of writing to Pat Coyle. Loneliness pressed him with hard knuckles. He longed to pour himself out, and there was no human being in whom he could entirely confide. He acknowledged now—now that he had come a journey of many thousand miles—that he was basing high hopes on Phœbe Meddar. He acknowledged it, and in the same breath upbraided himself for his folly. It was an expedition as hare-brained as a search for buried treasure.

He longed to see Phœbe, yet feared the encounter. For a moment he had a wild plan of rehearsing her in the romantic attitude he expected of her—if he could only have done it anonymously! He wanted to write, "Do, please, be imaginative enough to rise to the occasion. Do understand that Paul Minas is a quixotic creature with a highly intellectualized sentimentalism, that he has chosen you—you on the strength of old, tenuous associations—as the embodiment of a hundred indeterminate desires. So, don't for goodness' sake be commonplace—or at least, don't let your inevitable human

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 commonplaceness obtrude too bluntly. Don't stab his illusions; let them die of inanition if you must. Do, in short, understand him. He knows you can't really—nobody can, not even himself; he knows it, he knows it—but for the love of heaven, try, oh, try!"

Then he called himself an idiot, threw down his pen, and undressed. His thoughts were still revolving about Phœbe, and as he extinguished the lamp, the words of an old ditty came into his head:

That was it: Phœbe must give him a new light on himself, must help him discover his destiny. For he was still obsessed with the idea that he had a message for the world, even a sermon to preach. So far, like Aunt Verona, he had merely collected texts; it was time to sort them and make a synthesis.

From his window he saw rockets careening into the sky over the tree-tops. The village had trooped en masse to the, to enjoy its annual fête. By this time his arrival was known. Mrs. Barker and Miss Todd would have seen to that. Perhaps Phœbe knew. She would be certain to take an interest—if only by reason of the dearth of interests in Hale's Turning. On that thought his mind fastened and reposed.

For a month Paul was occupied in carrying out repairs on his house. Like a self-respecting ex-second-mate he mixed the paint himself, and even wielded a brush when he could spare the time. He had conferred in Halifax with Mr. Kingsley, the lawyer, who, after administering a well-merited scolding, had handed over to him deeds

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 and securities which placed him—from the Hale's Turning point of view—in the class of the well-to-do.

Although reinstatement in his native land had been accompanied by sharp disillusionment, although the people seemed ignorant and their aims petty, although Hale's Turning was little more to him than a plot of ground surrounding Aunt Verona's grave, nevertheless Paul derived a strange satisfaction from being at home. For the first time in his life he could review himself from a trustworthy angle. From his present self to the boy of twelve the lines converged in a perspective that gave a definite proportion to all his deeds. He saw in his tortuous development an instinctive plan of which he had not been clearly conscious during the process of developing. When he contrasted it with that of his former mates, he felt more than consoled for the loneliness and doubt of the intervening years. But satisfaction in his own accomplishment was tinged with bitterness. Why should one have attuned oneself to superfine reactions when life was preponderantly uncouth? Like a racehorse he could easily score on points, but not on utility; the world needed cart-horses.

with his revived aches which he had lived down, reminded him of days when he had stood with a bat in his hand, despite his hatred of organized sports, in the hope that by hitting an exasperating ball he might win from some playmate a reciprocal show of interest in his mental games—an interest which had not been forthcoming. He acutely remembered the jeers that had greeted his failure to hit the ball, his sense of humiliation, his dread of being always in the wrong. And in the interval, how many, many times had the situation been re-echoed!

For twenty years he had manufactured anæsthetics to deaden the smarts caused by disregard of senses raw and exposed.

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 the machine that is already sufficiently well constructed, or at any rate can be constructed on the foundations which exist, if the obstacles and hindrances that have hitherto been present be wisely and firmly removed.

4. Let us isolate and examine these obstacles.

(i) There is a great lack of methodical teachers who could take charge of public schools and produce the results that we have in view (indeed, with regard to my Janua which is already used in schools, a man of great judgment has written to me complaining that in most places one thing is lacking, namely, suitable men to use it).

5. (ii) But even if teachers of this kind existed, or if they could all perform their task with ease by using time-tables and forms all ready prepared for them, how would it be possible to support them in each village and town, and in every place where men are born and brought up in Christ?

6. (iii) Again, how can it be arranged that the children of the poor shall have time to go to school?

7. (iv) The opposition of pedants, who cling to old ways and despise everything that is new, is greatly to be dreaded, but for this some remedy can easily be found.

8. (v) There is one factor which by its absence or its presence can render the whole organisation of a school of no avail or can aid it in the highest degree, and that is a proper supply of comprehensive and methodical class-books. Since the invention of printing, it has been an easy matter to find men who are able and willing to make use of it, who will supply the funds necessary for the printing of good and useful books, and who will purchase books of this kind. Similarly, if the subsidiary apparatus necessary for comprehensive teaching were provided, it would be easy to find men to employ it.

9. It is evident, therefore, that the success of my scheme depends entirely upon a suitable supply of encyclopædic class-books, and these can be provided only by the collaboration of several original-minded, energetic, and learned men. For such a task transcends the strength of one man, and especially of one who is unable to devote his whole


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 Walter Dreer—not Mark Laval—John Ashmill, Wilfrid Fraser, Skinny Wiggins had found the world laid out for them. Their pastimes and professions were at hand like their clean shirts and stockings. Like the children of the grenadier's song, each had been "born into this world alive, either a little Liberal, or else a little Conservative." Paul had been born heir to an "obstinate questioning of sense and outward things." His most familiar sensation was still that of yearning; his only means of making up to himself what the world failed to provide had been to strengthen his self-reliance. He had come to rely solely on the dictum: "Have faith in yourself and nothing can prevail against you."

His first taste of self-vindication had come to him on the day at Port Said when he had wandered away over the sands instead of rejoining his ship. His first taste of real security came in the succeeding years, when, remote from every companion of his youth, he had discovered that he was nearly impervious to further incomprehension, indifferent to public opinion. It was an unsocial and perhaps unnatural kind of security, for one of its ingredients was disdain; but more natural kinds had eluded him; every attempt to identify himself with the world—schools, musical institutions, marine disciplines—had been ill-fated.

As a child he had judged himself abnormally weak. As a man he found himself in abnormal ways strong, the strongest personage he knew, except for artists and thinkers, whom he knew only through their expression. If he were, after all, strong, why couldn't he, too, like artists and thinkers, express himself, and thus patiently reduce the emotional havoc wrought by years of disproportion. It had been humiliating to slave in ships for enough to eat; but no one had been able to impair his integrity by so much as a finger-mark. The world he had envisaged as a pack of wolves which barely tol-

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Rh tual grasp, he was the exemplar also of princely hospitality and of friendship with others than Jews. His intercourse with one of the Antonines was typical of his wide culture. Life was not, in Rabbi Judah’s view, compounded of smaller and larger incidents, but all the affairs of life were parts of the great divine scheme. “Reflect upon three things, and thou wilt not fall into the power of sin: Know what is above thee—a seeing eye and a hearing ear—and all thy deeds are written in a book.”

The Mishnah, which deals with things great and small, with everything that concerns men, is the literary expression of this view of life. Its language is the new-Hebrew, a simple, nervous idiom suited to practical life, but lacking the power and poetry of the Biblical Hebrew. It is a more useful but less polished instrument than the older language. The subject-matter of the Mishnah includes both law and morality, the affairs of the body, of the


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 erated him when he howled his feeble quota in their interest and which were prepared to devour him if he took off his uncomfortable wolf's clothing; a mob which indulged in meaningless squabbles outside the walls of his stronghold. He had long since become a hermit in order to survive and now he found himself more isolated than ever. Bon! The world should see what a thorough-going hermit he could be.

Walter Dreer, who was cashier in the Bridgetown bank, had begun by hailing him as a priceless acquisition to the life of the community. But when Paul had failed to find satisfaction in the bucolic merriment of evening parties at which Walter was the scintillating jeune premier, Walter's attitude became resentful. Through the inevitable roundabout channels Paul learned that his old chum spoke of him as "a smart-Alec." This criticism was weakened by the fact, obvious to the village at large, that Walter aped him.

John Ashmill, his former oppressor, was more satisfactory. John's very grossness gave him a tolerance which approximated breadth of vision. He had gone into the lumber business with his father, and in hours of leisure his sole ambition was to be entertained. From far and near he collected cronies whom Hale's Turning considered "fast." He had disgraced his people by eloping with Bessie Day, a girl whom Paul still regarded as dirty and bold. The pair lived in a house on the hill above the Baptist Church, played cards, drank and danced. They had even been known to engage in these pastimes on Sundays, and Miss Todd, over her garden fence, had seen Bessie smoking! When Paul, according to clamorous invitations, accompanied John and Bessie to Halifax on a riotous week-end excursion, he was voted, by members of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, "Not so nice as he seemed."

Wilfrid Fraser, a good young man who had become

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 a Master of Arts and was wavering between a natural bent for school-teaching and an urge to "go in for law," giggled at Paul's most serious remarks, for he had been told Paul had a sense of humour.

Skinny Wiggins, whose profession was uncertain but who disappeared at intervals to "work on a tug," addressed Paul with a casualness that was meant to cloak honest stupefaction. For Skinny, Paul's transformation into a man who could dominate him with smiles, swift speech and even, as he suspected, muscle, was in the category of things unfathomable. In the end Skinny took to passing him with a nod, his hands thrust into his pockets, his cap over his eye, his cheek filled with chewing tobacco.

Mark Laval was the greatest disappointment. Throughout his youth Paul had thought of the French lad as a genius. He had looked forward with intense curiosity to seeing what Mark had made of himself. On his second day at home he met Mark at the post office, and it was evident his drunken father had made good the promise to "kick all the nonsense out of him." There were even signs that he had taught his son the delights of the bottle. Mark was down from camp with a split finger. He had grown into a giant. It was easy to see that he had never worn a presentable suit of clothes nor come under any refining personal influence. On recognizing Paul, however, his remarkable eyes gave forth a reflection of the wistful enthusiasm of former days. Not once did he complain of the ill fortune that had denied him an education, a home, a hundred desired boons, yet every vibration of his voice and every gesture proclaimed a brutalized, murdered longing for opportunities to discipline the creative forces that had welled up in him. It was with genuine reluctance that Paul, after a half hour's conversation, concluded that Mark's failure was due to absence of organizing ability. There

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 was no lack of detonating material; simply there was no gun.

"You was always a smart little feller," said Mark, as they were parting. "I knowed you was a wonder—and so y'are."

And so he was. A wonder even to himself! And all they could do was to let him go on being a wonder and go on wondering about it.

He completed the renovation of his house, labouring with a new determination. The profane world had failed him; he had in self-defence retired into his own. He must abide by the consequences, Better, at any rate, to be an intelligent hermit than a sheep—especially in the light of all this war-talk.

The Halifax Herald had reported diplomatic embroilments abroad, but Paul was not interested. Like most sailors he had not acquired a taste for newspapers. Ever since the days when he had argued with Otto, he had regarded everything connected with war as a misapplication of energy. War? Why, it was a phenomenon he had discussed out of countenance with army officers in Egypt and cast off as an antiquated institution, a thing to be placed in a museum beside the mummies.

But it had gone to the heads of the people like rum.

John Ashmill was going to enlist, in spite of old Dave's protests. At the age of twenty-seven John had outgrown every other form of excitement.

In Halifax, when Paul went to buy furniture for his house, men jumped upon soap-boxes and ranted, Never had the world seemed so colossally bad-mannered. Never had the walls of his fortress been so aimlessly battered; never had it seemed so impregnable.

There was a "mass meeting" in the town hall of Hale's Turning—a bare room over the post office where Paul

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 had been wont to play Clementi sonatinas at school concerts. He left in the middle of the first speech and wandered up the road towards his deserted house, carrying away two impressions: the image of a red-faced speaker, Mr. Dreer, who gave "facts" about Germany which were phantastically inaccurate, and a face for which he had been on the lookout. Phœbe Meddar had returned from her summer vacation, and he had seen her as he passed down the aisle. To his kindling interest she had responded with a polite little bow. He had been prepared for disappointment on the score of beauty, of imagination, of intelligence, but not of taste. The Phœbe whom he had recognized in the motley gathering was undoubtedly pretty, imaginative, intelligent—but she was "ladylike"; conspicuously and provincially so, like Flora Ashmill and Miss Todd. He had wanted Phœbe to be natural—not boisterously natural like Gritty Kestrell, but sweetly and gently natural. Yet his disappointment was mitigated, for Phœbe had been as distinct from her neighbours as a flower from its leaves.

The phrases of the sensation-monger still rang in his ears as he entered the dark house. He resented Mr. Dreer as he had long ago resented the evangelist. Both endeavoured to convert by fair means or foul; both were vulgar.

Mrs. Barker had been installed as cook-housekeeper, with a bedroom upstairs, and the playroom had been restored to the dignity of music-room. Here Paul had placed the few Persian and Egyptian objects he had brought from Cairo. The piano was still a brave instrument. He lit candles and sat down to obliterate the vexatious mood. The sound ran across the floors and echoed in far-away corners of the house. During lulls he heard the rustling boughs of the cherry tree. The candles flickered gently to airs that came in from the orchard, and over his shoulder Paul saw his own shadow

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 stretching eerily towards the blackboard on which he had been drawing a picture of a locomotive when Aunt Verona startled him with the strange word: "labyrinth."

That was life—a labyrinth, a never-ending spiral.

The rooms had been redecorated and Paul had begun to distribute the best pieces of Aunt Verona's furniture. Some had been removed to the woodshed whence they were to be transported to auction rooms in Bridgetown. On his way upstairs, he paused to rummage in drawers which had thus far escaped attention. In one he came on a lacquer box which seemed familiar, although he could not place it among his possessions. It was locked, and there was no key. Curiosity prompted him to force back the cover.

His eyes fell on a humble bunch of dried flowers: daisies, clovers, buttercups. He was puzzled A faint odour of coco-nut cookies gently assailed him and vanished. Then he remembered.

He closed the lid of the box and replaced it in the drawer. The girl of seven who had unconsciously set his emotions a-twitter for the first time and then succumbed to her dear little greediness had actually been the elder sister of the conspicuously ladylike young woman to whom he had bowed this very evening in the town hall. Perhaps, one day, he would bring Phœbe to his house to show her the box; its story could not fail to touch her.

As he undressed, the phrases of the speechmaker kept recurring. "A high duty to perform," "A sacred privilege to exercise," "An opportunity to devote oneself to a great cause."

What great cause? The cause of the herd that had made existence so difficult, against whose exquisite forms of oppression one had had the perseverance and ingenuity to render oneself proof? Not at all; it was the great cause, pardi! Nobody knew wherein the greatness lay;

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 everybody was too passionately carried away by all this greatness to inquire!

A high duty to take part in a savage "free-for-all" and take it seriously! A sacred privilege to go back into a dusty stampede! The answer was a snort. The Bridgetown Quakers were as unsympathetic, in the mass, as their conscientiously belligerent brothers in the mass. No mob's programme could be his; that was the essence of his experience.

After getting into bed he heard a sound which he took to be a knock at the door. He was startled, listened tensely for a moment, and concluded it was the wind. Then he remembered he had left the playroom window open. He had meant to close it, for there was an encampment of gypsies outside the village. He lit a candle and went downstairs. A puff of air extinguished the light, and he felt his way across the playroom.

Something in the atmosphere made him uneasy. A trace of his old dread of the dark assailed him, and he stood, back to the window, exhorting his nerves. The restlessness only increased, and he started violently when Mrs. Barker's clock in the kitchen whirred, preparatory to striking the hour.

Its tones recalled the exotic chimes, and the solace which was ever associated with them came to his aid. He could make out the position of the piano, for a corner of the polished lid faintly gleamed. His attention was suddenly but calmly riveted on this glow, which, whilst he looked, became more and more diffused, till it seemed to outline a human figure.

Paul breathlessly waited.

The figure died away, and no glow was left to mark the position of the piano. For some moments he stood rigid, then turned and left the playroom, numb, exalted, reassured—armed as with an invisible coat of mail.

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had become second nature for Paul to avoid his kind. As a sailor in port he had invariably slipped away from his mates. In the cafés of Europe he had preferred to sit at remote tables. Even in Cairo his real self had never mingled with his throng of acquaintances. Consequently he was in no sense disconcerted by a new esstrangement. However lonely he might feel, he was in a situation with which he knew how to cope.

There were days when he spoke to no one but Mrs. Barker, Mr. Silva, or Becky States, who still came to scrub and iron and chant unearthly melodies in her cracked, growling baritone. He developed reclusive habits that reminded him of Aunt Verona. He had already begun to collect texts—from such books as Norman Angell's The Great Illusion. "When," he sardonically mused, "shall I begin writing my futile history!"

Each new manifestation of the belligerent spirit intensified his disdain. His views were understood in no quarter and tolerated in few. Current patriotism struck him as being a glorification of the spirit in which Skinny Wiggins had been wont, with his bony fist, to prop a victim against a wall and reduce him to submission with the self-righteous query, "Did I? Did I? Say I did and I'll bust you in the eye!" Skinny certainly had; but had his heart been pure, his attitude was insulting and ill-bred—and patriotism was both. "My country, right Rh

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 or wrong!" cried the patriot, and the mob cheered. Well, let the mob not be surprised if he, Paul Minas, found the sentiment singularly fatuous. He listened with new ears to the National Anthem. Even poor, timid, quavering little Miss Todd could, with a holy zeal, sing:

He drew endless comfort from the picture of his deluded fellow-citizens, packed into the town hall, singing that last line with all their might!

Occasionally he lost his temper, under the stress. Once when Mr. Kingsley implied that his attitude was based on sophistry, Paul broke forth in an impassioned counter-charge. "Christliness," he concluded, "the most civilizing of all attitudes, assumes that men are brothers. The War Office assumes that they are members of opposing camps, all but one of which contain 'bloody foreigners.' I feel no urge to assert the superlative virtues of my particular nation and kill a lot of foreigners to prove the fictitious assertion. Why should I accept the mob's version? I've never accepted its opinion on any other issue. If I did I should have to accept its disapproval of outlandish traits that are a vital part of my own nature, which would be spiritual suicide. Forget 'honour' and 'righteousness,' cut out the hypocrisy, the drooling jingoism and sentimentality, and call on Mars. He's your man—not God. I should imagine by now your God is bloody well fed up with the whole of creation. I know I am. Do what you like with it—you and the people who understand its interests!"

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 The following winter, with its blizzards, ice and slush, seemed interminable. Paul read, and made music, oppressed by a sense of his dilettantism. It was maddening to be a mere fly on the cake of life—but even worse, he mused, to be a real currant, embedded in its dough. During the long transition weeks, when partial thaws alternated with frosts, when bleak winds and icy rains tore at the trees and fields in a final effort to frustrate the revival of life, Paul's isolation was relieved by conferences with old Dave Ashmill, who, in response to the increasing clamour for ships, had formed a syndicate to take over disused yards and, with lumber from his own mills, build wooden vessels on government contract. Paul had agreed to sell his properties, and accepted the post of secretary of the Hale's Turning yard.

There were many papers to prepare and arrangements to make for the installation of plant and procuring of supplies. Old Ashmill, like his son, cultivated a coarse heartiness which resembled broad-mindedness, and chuckled whenever Paul gave vent to subversive remarks of the sort which had stamped him, in the eyes of Hale's Turning, as an "atheist"—the most damning epithet in its bestowal—or "odd," the epithet that had attached to Miss Windell.

Mrs. Ashmill, who was prepared to receive him coldly, owing to his reputation, he had won over in one stroke by arriving at her house in a dinner jacket and addressing the parlour-maid as though she were a maid rather than a "hired girl." Flora Ashmill, a virgin of forty and quite the most genteel object in the country, was deliciously appalled by his authoritative manner of contradicting her on her best topics: painting, music, horticulture.

Regarding his resistance the two women maintained a pregnant silence, making their knitting needles click with

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 time to it, or who may be imperfectly acquainted with some of the subjects that must be included in the comprehensive scheme. Moreover, if absolute perfection be desired, one lifetime is not sufficient for the completion of the work, which must therefore be entrusted to a collegiate body of learned men.

10. But it is impossible to call such a body into existence unless it be supported and financed by some king or state, while to ensure success a quiet and secluded spot and a library are necessary. In addition, it is essential that no one offer any opposition to such a goodly plan for glorifying the Creator and benefiting the human race, but rather that all prepare to work in harmony with the grace of God, which will be communicated to us more liberally through these new channels.

11. Therefore let your zeal blaze forth when ye hear this wholesome counsel. O dearest parents of children, into whose charge God has entrusted His most precious treasures, those made in His own image, may ye never cease to entreat the God of Gods that these efforts may have a successful issue, and by your prayers and solicitations to work upon the minds of powerful and learned men. In the meantime, bring up your children piously in the fear of God, and thus prepare the way for that more universal education of which we have spoken.

12. Do you also, O instructors of the young, whose task it is to plant and water the tender grafts of paradise, pray with all earnestness that these aids to your labours may be perfected and brought into daily use as soon as possible. For since ye have been called that “ye may plant the heavens and lay the foundations of the earth” (Isaiah li. 16), what can be more pleasing to you than to reap as rich a harvest as possible from your labour? Therefore, let your heavenly calling, and the confidence of the parents who entrust their offspring to you, be as a fire within you, and give you and those who come under your influence no rest until the whole of your native land is lit up by this flaming torch.


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 symbolic purport. They were bound to respect his views, for Mr. Ashmill had given out, with a hint of sardonic humour, that "Young Minas" was "indispensable" to him in his government shipbuilding project. Old Dave was universally suspected of a penchant for cheating all forms of orthodoxy on the sly, while conspicuously upholding them.

As befitted the leading family of Hale's Turning, the Ashmills patronized education. Mrs. Ashmill awarded an annual scholarship, and her daughter gave an annual "strawberry social" at which objects were sold for the purpose of raising funds to buy plaster models of "The Winged Victory" and lithographs of the Colosseum for the schoolhouse. The teachers were also invited once a year to dinner, and it was this rite that brought Paul into contact with Phœbe Meddar. So far he had only exchanged casual phrases with her at the post office where the villagers repaired every evening, ostensibly to collect letters, inostensibly to gossip. The ladylikeness which had vexed him on his first glimpse of Phœbe he now put down to constraint. It was most marked in the presence of Flora Ashmill, whose method of establishing her own superiority was to place everybody else at a disadvantage.

"How do you ever manage to keep it up year in and year out, Miss Meddar?" Flora murmured, referring to Phœbe's position in the village school.

"Oh, really, Miss Ashmill, it isn't so bad," Phœbe explained, hesitating between natural shyness and a desire to be hearty. "I actually enjoy it."

Paul leapt to the rescue. "Of course she does. You ladies who've been sheltered like beautiful greenhouse roses"—he paused a second to let Flora revel in it—"often miss one of life's best thrills: the thrill of fulfilling a responsibility."

Flora, who was plain and unloved, let her soul linger

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 over the word he had so deftly tossed to her—"beautiful," and Phœbe sent across the table a glance acknowledging his protection. Her cheeks were like petals. "I wonder if you're really as remarkable as the addle-pated girls of Hale's Turning make out," her nice blue eyes seemed to say.

After dinner Mrs. Ashmill proposed music. Would Mr. Minas care to play? Paul welcomed the suggestion. In this hideous plush drawing-room, many years ago, he had played for guests of Miss Ashmill driven indoors by a shower which had blasted the booths at her strawberry social.

"And you were so small," Flora archly reminded him, "that you couldn't reach the pedals."

For the first time since his return Phœbe favoured him with a directly personal allusion. "Oh," she laughed, "he was the sort of child who would simply imagine he was pedalling and somehow produce the same effect."

Paul shot her a look of delighted surprise. It was shrewd. And, for Hale's Turning, original. But for the stiff presence of the Ashmill ladies and the silly stare of Myrtle Wilcove he would have been tempted to reply, "Exactly, and if you only knew it, Phœbe, he was the sort of child who while practising in a bare playroom used to imagine that you were listening to his strains, and he played all the better for the breathless interest his image of you took in them!" In the circumstances all he dared say was a bantering:

"How well you understand small boys! Does that come from experience as a teacher, or is it a natural gift?"

Phœbe's ladylikeness had vanished. "Oh, I'm sure the ability to understand you implies something more than either, something approximating genius!" The sarcasm was veiled by the gentleness of her voice, her frank

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 smile, the suggestion of pale gilding that marked the contours of her smooth hair, her compact little figure, her simple black satin frock.

The retort pleased him, yet as he turned to the keyboard he shrugged his shoulders with a trace of the humiliation he had always felt as being treated as a superior being, instead of a quite ordinary boy.

At half-past nine he escorted Phœbe from the house, past the historic rose-beds. Wrapped in cloaks and equipped with overshoes and a lantern, they plodded through acres of slush which Phœbe likened to pineapple sherbet. For an unnaturally long period Paul had eschewed feminine society. The cosiness of the girl whose arm he was holding roused susceptibilities that had been lying torpid. Phœbe chatted easily, but never aimlessly. Her remarks were inclined to be edged. Her reserve piqued him. It was as though there were a lump in it which all his personal arts failed to dissolve. He decided, on the spot, to challenge her.

"Tell me, Phœbe"—it was the first time he had used her name—"why do you dislike me?"

She looked up at him, her face a patchwork of curved shadows cast by the lantern. Her lips were closed and there was a half timid glint in her eyes.

"Do I?" she fenced.

"Yes, a little. It's not so much dislike as distrust. Why?"

She considered it. "Why don't you answer the question for yourself, since you seem to know so much about my feelings—more than I do, I assure you."

With a grunt he recalled the far distant occasion when she had been unable to state the colour of his eyes. "Do you mean you don't know that you distrust me?" he insisted.

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 have dulled your sensitiveness. You must have had some bad times."

He was touched. "It's good to hear you say that."

"For mercy's sake, why?"

He came back to a flippant tone to conceal his concession to sentimentality. "Because," he laughed, "it's another neat sign of your comprehension of small boys—or rather a small boy. It proves you, according to your own rating, approximately a genius. Besides, now that you've said it, I'm sure the verdict is only 'distrust.' It was not the sort of remark one makes of a person one dislikes."

"Aren't you conceited!" she commented.

"Ah, now I understand the grounds for distrust."

"I dare say you understand heaps of things. Here's the gate. Will you come in?"

He declined the formal invitation, and stood, throwing the lantern's rays along the pathway. Within the last half hour Phœbe had revived his romantic hopes for her. She seemed to have it in her to rise to occasions.

He splashed his way homeward with a refreshed courage. It was as though his inner egos were happily smiling, after long days and nights of unacknowledged chagrin.

As he entered his house he hummed a snatch from an opera he had heard in some far corner of the globe: "Io son barbiere, di qualita—di qualita."

Why, he asked himself, should that particular ditty come to his lips? What on earth was the association between The Barber of Seville and the mood of the evening? For a few moments he indulged in the fascinating exercise of thinking backward, in search of a clue to the mysterious workings of sub-consciousness. At last he had it: qualita, quality. "Quality" was the word for which his mind had groped at the dinner table, when trying to define the flavour of the Ashmill ladies.

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 They considered themselves persons "of quality"—that was it.

Quality, Quality Street—Phœbe Throstle! Everything led back to Phœbe!

He shivered as he passed the open door of the ghostly playroom, and hurried upstairs to bed.

Inordinate bustle troubled the slumbers of Hale's Turning with the advent of spring, reminding the aged of days when ship "lanchings" were of frequent occurrence. From the riverside issued an incessant din of trip-hammers, and as summer wore on, the hulls of three stocky steamers loomed up. On Sunday afternoons the pastime of the godly was to walk along the bluff, survey these evidences of Dave Ashmill's ingenuity, and make comment on the progress since the previous Sabbath.

Paul's abilities had been discovered by old Dave and put to the best advantage. Chief among them was a knack he had acquired at sea of handling men. Ashmill's success had been due in good measure to his gift for suborning brains, and Paul knew, from Aunt Verona, that his own father had swelled the Ashmill fortunes by enlarging the foreign market.

Paul noted that the people who had liked him seized on his new occupation with relief, as though to assure him that by contributing his knowledge of ships towards the success of the allies he was in a measure redeeming himself. He declined the shift.

"I'm doing it not because it's my 'bit, he said truculently one day to the Baptist minister, "but because building ships is always a worth-while task."

"And sinking them?"

"Is, of course, insane."

"Ah, my young friend, how true! I fear Germany's

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 insanity is of the incurable kind. That comes of denying her God."

"Don't talk rot, man," said Paul, who still harboured a grudge against the sect that had tried to Shanghai him into the fold, "It's insane to fire off twelve-inch guns. All phases of warfare are insane. We're no more exempt than the enemy."

The minister was stung by the trace of contempt in Paul's tone. "Do you realize?" he asked, "that your remarks might be interpreted as seditious?"

"Fully. The truth is always seditious—as Socrates and Christ knew to their cost. You men of God don't preach Christ these days. You preach Jehovah, and choose the bloodiest texts in the Old Testament. Why not be consistent—be patriarchal, practise polygamy, and the whole bag of tricks!"

The minister bowed and walked away. Paul had no remorse, for he was settling an old score. He was not impious. Faith had been bred in him through occasional flashes of insight. He passionately envied adepts who had penetrated into the inner temples. But his religion was an intensely personal relationship with the infinite—an infinite which men, in the feebleness of their imagination, had had to personify as an old gentleman with a beard. He heartily endorsed the proverb which says: "Il vaut mieux avoir affaire à Dieu qu' à ses saints." Of course he had made an enemy of the minister, but he preferred enemies to friends who edited his conduct to bring it into conformity with their mechanical orthodoxy.

Even Phœbe, his new friend, persisted in hushing up his heterodoxies, though he had striven to train her into understanding, if not sharing, his own contempt of criticism. His views had shocked her, as they shocked all the others. But Phœbe possessed a mind that invited ideas. Unlike the girls with whom she had studied at Normal School, she had not considered her education

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 at an end when she received a diploma. Paul had patiently waited for her to overcome her first distrust, to conquer the pride which made her hold out against the personality that had flurried less fastidious women. But in the end it was inevitable they should be together, for he alone could give her glimpses of a civilization broader and richer than that of which she, as assistant principal of the local school, was the accredited representative.

Paul guessed that other girls twitted Phœbe for her interest in him, and in order to spare her had checked his first advances. He guessed, too, that his advent was responsible for a certain coolness between Phœbe and Wilfrid Fraser, who had paid attention to her for years. He had known Phœbe subtly defiant with the girls who were loudest in their war zeal, and he had observed, with sweetly painful concern, her distrust of him change gradually to trust, her edged retorts give way to earnest and intimate confidences. He knew that Phœbe's invalid mother disapproved of his iconoclasm. He knew that Bob Meddar, whom he liked, had warned Phœbe against accepting at their face value the ideas of a confessed visionary—and, worst of all, he knew that Bob's warning was fearfully well-founded. Yet he was drawn.

Phœbe wept helplessly when Bob went overseas. A few months later she saw Wilfrid off to Ottawa, where he had obtained a war post that exempted him from action for which he was physically disqualified. Paul met Phœbe a few days later at the post office, and their interview was a little strained.

He had found a note from Mark Laval, written just before embarking. It was short, but glowed with enthusiasm, as Mark's eyes had glowed in the days when he declaimed romantic verse under the cherry tree. "One of them there dumdums will probably get me," Mark concluded, "but it will be better than a tree falling on me."

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 As they walked through the fields Paul read the letter to Phœbe.

"Mark will be a good soldier," she commented.

"Yes—for men like him the war means emancipation. For men like Wilfrid Fraser it would mean torture, slavery, and death. Sensibilities are a luxury society dispenses with in . The arrangement would be more successful if the sensitive men could dispense with their own sensibilities at a given signal. But butterflies don't revert into caterpillars."

"Just the same," said Phœbe, with a hint of hostility, "Wilfrid is doing his bit."

"That's such a glib word, Phœbe—'bit.' You who are so meticulous, why don't you avoid it?" He spoke more testily than the trifle warranted, his nerves showing the strain of increasingly intensive propagandapropaganda. [sic]

He knew her feelings were hurt, for she half turned from him. With a tinge of pride and a tinge of appeal in his tones he apologized. Some maternal instinct stirred in her, and she took his arm.

"I'm trying to understand you, Paul," she said. "But you're so different from everybody I know!"

He was moved, "At any rate you don't despise me—that's something to hold to."

"Oh Paul—despise!" There were tears in her voice.

They had reached a deserted grove of alders behind the Meddar cottage. Suddenly he took Phœbe in his arms and kissed her—gently. For some time her face lay against his shoulder. When she finally looked up she gave him an anxious smile. Her eyes were like wet violets.

He held her close, as if to assure himself by sheer contact that he had not made a mistake.

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 isolation natural to him was for her a new and trying experience. She continued to knit and make bandages, but worked in private, recoiling from the chatter about slackers and heroes. Unwittingly she antagonized shallow girls and noticed that Myrtle Wilcove, who had been a competitor for her position at the school, made the most of her advantage with public opinion.

When coercive measures began to be seriously discussed Phœbe was dismayed. It had been hard enough to be torn daily between the duty of teaching her pupils prescribed lessons in patriotism and that of defending an unpatriotic lover, but it was harrowing to guess the consequences of his attitude should conscription come into effect.

"What will you do then, dear?" she inquired timidly.

He was hurt by the implication that he might adapt his principles to the exigencies of society and made a truculent reply.

Phœbe was quiet for a while and they sat staring into the open door of the Klondike stove in her mother's sitting-room—a room embellished with shells and painted ostrich eggs.

"But Paul—they will—don't they?"

"Send one to prison, you mean? Don't be afraid to speak plainly, Phœbe. Now's a time for honest people to do so, now that highfalutin lies are being hoisted banner-like for folk to rally under. . . . No doubt I'll be sent to prison if the worst comes to the worst."

Her lips were quivering.

"They won't shoot me," he added bitterly. "Which proves that society, after all, has an embryonic conscience."

Then he relented and took her in his arms.

"I'm so selfish," she sobbed, as he petted her, "to make you supply courage for two, when I ought to be a source of strength to you."

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 "You are, dear—you are," he replied abstractedly. But to himself he had to avow that Phœbe was in his boat—his privateer—only as supercargo. He was haunted by the problem of her fate; it weighed on him more heavily than his own.

Some weeks later he found her with red eyes, shrinking. Her manner drove from his mind a momentous development in his own affairs which he had come to announce. He talked of trivial matters, waiting for a clue. They came around to the inevitable topic, and suddenly, with a little rush of words, Phœbe suggested that he should make some compromise before it was too late.

"You might do something that would keep you from the actual fighting. Couldn't you"

Paul rose from his chair and paced the room. "Is that all you've been able to make of my abstention?" he cried. "Compromise? Now? I'm less ready to compromise than I've ever been."

The statement echoed in his ears like some death knell of reasonableness. Life was a matter of winds and currents, and one's views must be swung about like the yards of a ship if one hoped to avoid reefs. In his most lucid moments he perceived that he was stubborn, as Aunt Verona had been. Yet fatalistically he pitted his obduracy against what he regarded as the massed stubbornness of the world. He preferred shipwreck on the shores of his own Utopia to arrival in the promised land of the commonalty.

Phœbe was weeping, and he guessed that something unusual had happened. He approached to pat her shoulder and saw the tears come more freely. Then, her face buried in her hands, she explained that her brother had been killed.

For a long while Paul held her in his arms, consoling her as best he could. In the end she became quiet, and Paul, chastened, let her talk.

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 "Oh, how could they—how could they?" she cried, with a return to incoherence. "Poor old Bobby—Oh, why can't I go out and avenge him!"

He had never heard her so emphatic. Although she was unstrung by grief, he could not refrain from presenting the corrective aspect of the case. "But don't you see, Phœbe dear, that's the spirit that has brought all this horror about? The more one avenges, the more there is to avenge. It reduces civilization to an arena, and peace merely means 'half time'—a pause during which you rest and repair yourself for new frays."

Phœbe was listening fitfully. "They must be wrong though, Paul—Oh, don't you ever feel that you could wipe such people off the face of the earth? But of course you don't—forgive me, dear."

Through a haze he saw Phœbe retreating. Mechanically he replied:

"All I feel is that some girl like you in Munich is saying exactly those words to some man like me, provided they have any who are still out of the net."

"They haven't—you may depend on it." She said it in a tone which her nervousness rendered somewhat aggressive, then halted in a panic.

He looked at her steadily. "You were going to add, 'And we shouldn't have any, either.

Phœbe rose and walked to the window. "Oh, it's hideous. I just can't make it out."

He had an irresistible impulse to test her.

"Would it make matters more comprehensible to you if I were to give in after all?"

She wheeled about. In her glance he read what he had dreaded to find: a hope that he would be unfaithful to the principles which she knew he venerated but which she could only partially understand. He was something Phœbe had "taken up" as she had taken up chemistry and mathematics, and the study was a little beyond her.

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 He turned away with a heavy sigh. "Unfortunately, I don't think much of deathbed conversions," he said. Her distress now failed to move him; he was too exhausted to feel.

She took his hands imploringly.

"Oh, Paul, I'm stupid. But I do wish to understand for I—" She hesitated again, at his unresponsiveness, and he patted her hands, then replaced them at her sides.

"No not even that," he said, flinching from the truth, yet forcing his way toward it. "You thought you loved me, and in a sort of way you do. But it's not quite the way, and it's not your fault. I should never have inflicted myself on you. I ought to know better than to invite people to subscribe to me. I fail them, and they fail me. But one can't always be wise and farsighted. One so dreads to be eternally thrust back on oneself. . . . A vagrant has no right to claim love and understanding; he sacrifices that for his independence. Besides, a vagrant has nothing to offer in exchange—save picturesque tales of his selfish vagrancy!"

As he talked he heard the words falling dead at Phœbe's feet, as all his weighted words must. She could understand him only when his speech soared on wings of passion. Even yet he might sweep her doubts aside in a single gesture, but all passion had subsided. He saw her fingers twisting and intertwining, and looked away.

"In other circumstances," he went on, "we might have found in each other enough love to sustain us. The war has divided the world into camps of thought, with orthodox folk joined together in temporary fraternity in one, and in the other an assortment of outcasts with an assortment of loyalties. You're not in my camp, dear. It wouldn't even be wise that you should be."

Phœbe winced, but the hard cogent tone helped to steady her. "Who are your colleagues?" she demanded.

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 "God only knows. They must exist. I haven't lost faith in rationality even yet."

"But how can you choose isolation?"

He smiled grimly, remembering for the first time the tidings he had come to impart. "My social isolation became one degree more acute to-day," he announced, "and not from choice. I've been asked to resign from the shipyard."

Phœbe's face exhibited consternation. "Oh, but Paul! I thought Mr. Ashmill declared you were indispensable to him!"

"His good repute is even more so. He has political enemies, and couldn't afford to have them go on badgering him about his able-bodied young secretary. As the little song says, 'I for one don't blame him.

"But how terrible! My dear, what will you do?"

The exclamation and the question bored him. "Oh, Phœbe," he said, and his voice broke, "does it dreadfully matter?"

He left her, unable to promise that he would return. The prospect of further scenes, further misunderstandings, futile tears, was more than he could face. Phœbe had pronounced her doom and his when she reminded him that he had to supply courage for both. He hadn't enough.

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afternoon in the summer of 1917 Walter Dreer arrived on leave from Toronto in the uniform of a cadet in the air force. He had transferred from service to service, with the result that he had not yet been sent overseas.

His greeting to Paul was, "Hello, when are you going to join up?"

"I hadn't thought of joining up at all."

Walter, who had hitherto reserved taunts for occasions when Paul was not on hand to parry them, felt emboldened by the presence of his father, who walked proudly beside him.

"Content to let somebody else fight for you?" Walter threw out.

"Not at all," Paul replied. "I always fight my own battles."

Walter could make nothing of this. "It don't look like it," he finally commented.

"Looks are deceiving," said Paul, surveying his old chum's uniform. "Take yourself. Anybody would think you had been fighting—for me, as you put it." He had a desire to punctuate Walter's fraudulent heroics.

"It's lucky there's nobody else around to hear you talking like that."

"Well, now that you're back, Walter, all Hale's Turning will get a report of my words." It was the only time he had referred to Walter's propensity for gossip. Rh

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 "By Joe, if I hadn't known you as a kid"

"You wouldn't realize how beautifully consistent my attitude has been throughout," Paul finished it.

"Beautifully crazy!" interposed Mr. Dreer, with a snort.

"As you decide," replied Paul.

"It's not a time for fancy phrases," pronounced Mr. Dreer severely.

"Then why do you publicly indulge in them?" Paul inquired. He alluded to meetings in the town hall and at Bridgetown.

"That's my affair, sir. I'm too old to carry a gun."

"Yes, aren't you glad?"

"Damn you—your insolence has gone beyond the limit."

Paul's wrath came to the surface. He had not sought the quarrel. "What do you expect of a crazy man?" he retorted, and strode away, leaving father and son to assure each other of their moral advantage.

He knew he had gone beyond the limit this time—of discretion, if not of insolence. There were bound to be consequences; but he almost welcomed them. Anything would be better than the present negative status. Even the illusion of Phœbe's support was gone.

The sequel to the passage at arms with Mr. Dreer came a few weeks later in the form of a summons to appear before a special board in Halifax and explain alleged statements of a seditious character. Then only did Paul realize how many enemies he had made. Mr. Dreer, with the aid of his son and the Baptist minister, had compiled the evidence. There were records of conversations with men in the shipyard—some of them fairly accurate, literally, but robbed of the context, lacking the ironical stress and the qualifying clauses that had characterized Paul's utterances. Not once had he advanced his views without provocation; not once had he

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 sought to make converts. The charges seemed to him puerile and he listened with an air of aloofness.

It was intimated that "things" would be "made easy" if he were willing to undertake certain missions for which his attainments specially fitted him. He declined the loophole. "It's entirely a matter of principle," he maintained. Hence they did not make it easy for him.

"And serve him right!" said Hale's Turning, with the exception of Miss Todd, Mrs. Kestrell, Mrs. Barker, Becky States, Mr. Silva, old Silas and Phœbe Meddar.

Phœbe, overcome by the shock, wrote a letter in which she diffidently, and between the lines tearfully, attempted to creep back, to reassure him of her continued faith and goodwill and love. On the bottom of the sheet he wrote:

"The faith I'll keep on trust, Phœbe. The goodwill is still more acceptable, for on the cultivation of that article the salvation of the world depends. The love I'm sending back, dear, ever so gently, with your letter. You'll have wiser uses for it."

Of all the messages he received, that from old Dave Ashmill struck him as being the most apt. "You have two big faults, boy," wrote his former employer. "You're too smart and too honest for your own good. Let me know if I can do anything."

Paul smiled cynically. Old Dave's opportunism always prevailed over his generosity. That explained why Andrew Minas had died poor, when he ought to have prospered on just commissions for charters he had obtained for Ashmill. Paul knew that the patriot, Ashmill, would not trouble to put in a word with the authorities for a young man whom the profiteer, Ashmill, slyly admired. Simply because the shrewd profiteer had observed that his secretary had become bored with shipbuilding—as he became bored with everything in life that failed to add cubits to his spiritual stature. And old Dave, like most of the men Paul had encountered, was

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 more ready to pay a deposit on a new order than settle for goods already received.

"Let me know if I can do anything for you." That was what the world all generously said, whenever it was sure that one would be too proud to take it at its word.

Imprisoned and abandoned, Paul marvelled that anything so intangible as a point of view could bring one to such a pass—such an inevitable point of view, and such a phantastic pass! He disbelieved in martyrdom, yet knew that he would have been ready to make any sacrifice, even that of life itself, for his principle. He could only conclude that the issue had been after all a matter of life and death for him—the life or death of his individuality. He was still obsessed by the idea that he had something to express, in the sense that artists and thinkers "express." Had he yielded to mass reasoning and entered a fight which in no way touched his moral fibre, his message, he felt, would have been irretrievably lost. By sheltering the principles he had long nurtured, he hoped to bring his life to the point of blossoming, if not of fruit-bearing.

As the months crept by, months during which meditation was an antidote to the hideously importunate reality of his surroundings, his past took on new meaning, and the dejection into which he had settled gave place to a sombre ecstasy as, bit by bit, he puzzled out a future of self-realization—made it out tentatively, hopefully, romantically. The watching and recording faculty, the warder of his thoughts and emotions, told him he was going through hell, and an idealizing faculty, their chaplain, persuaded him that this was a necessary stage of his progress, that the fire would strip him of garments he had worn for the sake of convention. With this certitude to support him, the tension relaxed.

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 13. Ye men of learning, to whom God has given wisdom and keen judgment that ye may be able to criticise such matters as these and improve them by your counsels, see that ye delay not to assist the sacred fire with your sparks, nay, rather with your torches and with your fans. Let all consider that saying of our Christ: “I came to cast fire upon the earth; and what will I if it is already kindled?” (Luke xii. 49). If He wish His fire to burn, woe unto him who, when he has the opportunity of bringing fuel to the flames, contributes nothing but the smoke of envy, malevolence, and position. Remember the reward that He promises to His good and faithful servants who employ the talents entrusted to them in such a way that they gain others, and the threats that He utters against the slothful who bury their talents in the earth (Matt. xxv. 25). Therefore, let not your own knowledge suffice you, but use all your strength to further the instruction of others. Be guided by the example of Seneca, who says: “I wish to communicate all that I know to others”; and again: “If knowledge were given me on the condition that I should keep it to myself and not share it with others, I should refuse it” (Epist. 27). Do not, therefore, withhold instruction and wisdom from the Christian people, but rather say with Moses: “Would God that all the Lord’s peoples were prophets!” (Num. xi. 29). The reformation of the Church and of the state is comprised in the proper instruction of the young; and shall we, who know this, stand idle, while others put their hand to the work?

14. May we all, with one accord, be moved to promote such a worthy object in every possible manner by advising, warning, exhorting, reforming, and in every way furthering the work for God and for posterity. And let no one think that he is not called upon to act in the matter. For though a man may be naturally unsuited to be a schoolmaster, or may be fully engaged by his duties as a clergyman, a politician, or a physician, he makes a great mistake if he think that he is on that account exempt from the common task of school-reform. If he wish to prove his devotion to


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 Often now, when lost in meditation, he recaptured the experience of "just being." By holding his faculties in poise he could relapse at will into a state of trance through which came a radiant vision. The discordant forces of human nature redistributed themselves, producing a harmony so exquisite and so complex that the mind grew faint in trying to grasp it. The world revealed itself a transcendent instrument on which one's life would be played as a mighty solo, without a false chord.

From one of these trance-like abstractions he emerged to find a keeper staring at him. Paul returned the stare, wonderingly, and the keeper departed. From that moment he was more closely watched. He concluded they suspected him of lunacy.

When the exalted moods passed, he clung to the memory of his visions with the feverish tenacity of a man whose experience has been an alternation of romantic expectations and brusque deceptions. This next adventure, towards which all his instincts, like tendrils, had been reaching forth since the dawn of experience, must not be bungled, lest the future become a descent into nothingness. He sought support in the poetry which had made an impression on his youth, but the odds seemed against success. Poets seldom got farther than passionately envying the happiness of skylarks. The youth whose motto was "Excelsior" mounted high, but in Alpine snows succumbed to his own fanaticism. Paul thought of himself as Wordsworth's youth, "Nature's Priest," lured by the vision of immortality which had attended him as a child. Heaven had lain about him in his infancy; even yet he caught glimpses of an eternal effulgence which gave him courage to defy the life of "sense and outward things." But the poet warned him:

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 To make his "shadowy recollections" more tangible, he resorted to pen and paper, even though the transcription should be but a poor caricature. Then one day, as he the pages, his heart stopped beating. He had detected an echo of youthfully exuberant letters from Aunt Verona to his mother—letters which had lain undisturbed in old boxes for over forty years. Aunt Verona had seen visions and counted on realizing them. The future had lured her, hinted at benign auspices. But her future had turned out to be nothing but Paul's early present—now his past! Aunt Verona's light had gone out, leaving her in a fog of desolation, disease, delusion, and death. What assurance had he that his version of the truth was more authentic than those of his sweaty, psalm-singing fellow-convicts?

A mortal weariness seized on him, and he tore up his lyrical diary.

When the gates swung open he passed through with a mechanical nod of goodwill. He ignored the directions given by the man who closed the gates after him, and walked at haphazard until he came to a familiar grassy slope.

Above him stretched the hill where he had sat and ruminated one autumn afternoon—the afternoon on which he had defied the gym instructor. From the citadel he had gazed towards ships in the roads, free ships that roamed at will in search of exotit havens.

He was sorry for that far-away boy who had longed for freedom, only to learn that it entailed crushing obligations. The boy had shouldered them, earned his title-deeds, and when youth was gone handed the precious legacy to the man. The man in consequence was now free; his claim was beyond a shadow of doubt. And for that very reason the sight of noble ships lying at anchor

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 gave him, now, no sense of exhilaration. He thought not of their incomparable privilege as roamers; but of the dreary fate which buffeted them from harbour to harbour in a quest that was never fulfilled. Poor ships! Poor boy! Yet he envied, as well as pitied the boy—envied him his blazing faith in the treasures that lay beyond the horizon. Poor man! His faith nowadays, at best, merely glowed; often it lay cold and ash-buried. It might once more burst into flame—a flame that should serve as a beacon. But it would need the most delicate fanning.

His eyes wandered over the soot-besmirched city. How sure it was of itself—like all things ugly.

He took a deep breath, shrugged his shoulders, and walked down the hill, making for the office of his solicitor. Mr. Kingsley started up with an air of surprise and offered him an awkward greeting.

"Well?" he finally inquired.

"I'd like you to arrange for the immediate sale of everything I possess," announced Paul.

"Everything?"

"Every square inch of land, every stick, every stock—the whole shooting-match."

"Won't you explain your idea—I don't quite see"

"You needn't. You'll receive the usual commission."

Mr. Kingsley winced, but took down Paul's instructions.

"You plan to go away again?" he inquired, when the business was settled.

"Yes."

"I suppose you'll let us hear from you occasionally."

"Probably not."

Mr. Kingsley looked offended, then, with a sympathy which Paul dismissed as belated, left his desk and crossed the room to stand beside his client. "Look here, Minas, you mustn't take this thing so hard. I knew your father

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/303