text:
Nature's Vagabond

EORGE TEMPLE left the shade of the station and, tilting his straw hat over his eyes, strode out into the sun.

The day was still young, fresh, and sweet. All the world was up and about, and as he turned into the lane that, said the finger post, led to the village green, two miles away, a thousand voices shouted a welcome. Where the lane narrowed, the trees clasped hands above his head, and patches of sun fell on the dusty road between their leaves, like disks of gold. Frogs panted among the trembling grasses that lined the ditches on each side of him, and linnets, thrushes, blackbirds, and bullfinches piped and trilled in the hedges. Bees busied from flower to flower, filling the air with their industrious hum, and a faint, soft breeze—perhaps it was more a rustle than a breeze—made the heads of all the grasses nod.

Through the hedges golden patches of nearly ripened corn caught his eyes, spangled at the edges of the fields with splashes of poppies, which swayed their impertinent vermilion heads in a kind of rhythm, as if they were keeping time to music, as indeed they were. The passionate voices of a hundred larks filled the air with their soprano songs, accompanied by the sharp, clear flutings of thrushes and blackbirds, the seductive cooing of wood pigeons, and the harmonious undercurrent of insects.

The first milestone, worn, weather-stained, moss-ingrained, fell behind him as Temple gained the hill. Here the trees on his right and left ended abruptly; on purpose, it seemed to him, to disclose the view of the fair valley through which flowed the river, a silent thing, winding its silver. way through county after county to the sea.

Below, to the left, nestled the red-roofed village round the prim tower of its mother, the church. To the right stretched a panorama that made Temple involuntarily fling out his arms and draw a long breath. Field after field of standing corn, set on fire by the sun, each bounded by lines of lanky poplars, covered the ascent; then came orchards; and then, all the way up and over the hill, a great wood of young trees, whose leaves, of every shade of green, fitted as closely as curly hair.

Temple turned away, exhilarated. The sight of the good red earth, bearing fruit, filled him with a kind of reverence, and the clean, flower-scented air rubbed the lines out of his face like the soft fingers of a woman.

In front of him an old man, bent and rheumatic, with a wooden leg, was sweeping the road.

“Good morning!” sang out Temple.

“Marnin',” replied the road mender, without looking up.

“Can you tell me whereabouts in the village Mr. Rudd lives?”

The old man looked up quickly and leaned on the handle of his broom. A smile wandered across his face, in and out of its thousand lines.

“'Im as backs the 'osses? Oi knaws 'im by sight, as well as Oi knaws the crannies along this 'ere road—ter speak ter, too, fer 'e never goes by wi'out a word; but blame me if Oi knaws wheer 'e lives!”

Temple laughed because the old man laughed, and because the mere mention of Billy Rudd made for laughter.

“Thanks,” he said. “I dare say some one will know. Good morning.”

The old man nodded, and Temple swung on. For a long time he could hear the chuckle of the road mender.

Came a young, rosy-faced woman, with an unsteady baby hanging to a finger. Temple touched his hat.

“Good morning,” he said, stopping. “Would you be kind enough to tell me whereabouts in the village Mr. Rudd lives?”

A smile came quickly to the woman's face, like a shaft of sunlight.

“Well, Oi knaws 'im,” she said. “Everybody knaws Mr. Rudd, the poet; but Oi don't knaw as ever Oi heard wheerabouts 'e lives.”

Again, for the same reason, Temple laughed, thanked the woman, touched the baby's firm, pink cheek, and passed on toward the village.

As usual with villages, a “Blue Cow” lay in waiting at its entrance, trough well filled, gravel well swept at its threshold. A burly man in gaiters stood on the worn step, eying a rough pony in the shafts of a high cart with tireless wheels.

“I beg your pardon,” said Temple. “May I trouble you to tell me whereabouts in the village Mr. William Rudd lives?”

This time Temple's mention of the name awoke not a mere smile, but a frank guffaw.

“No trouble ter tell ye, sur,” said the man, putting two fingers to the brim of his hat, “but Oi jest doan't knaw, an' that's the truth. Oh, Oi knaws the gentleman. If you'll excuse my saying so, 'e's known 'ereabouts as 'Sunny Bill,' fer if there ever were a man as made much of the sun, it's Master Rudd. 'The Slackster' 'e's called, too—but Oi didn't mean ter tell ye that. But as ter knawing wheer he lives”

He finished with a gesture and another guffaw.

“Oh, well, I dare say they'll know down in the village. Thanks. Delightful weather.”

“Aye, that it be.”

And for the third time Temple passed on.

Straggling, the village began; first the forge, with its concomitant smell of singeing hair and its ringing metallic sounds, and the inevitable group of men and boys around its door; then the post office, which sold tea and black lead, cigarettes and cod-liver oil, butter and bootlaces.

Into this went Temple.

“Where does Mr. Rudd live, please?”

An old lady took a bit of string out of her mouth and wrestled with a smile. It spread to an old man in a skullcap, who was packing sugar into green bags, and to a freckled boy who was piling bundles of wood into a large basket.

The old lady cleared her throat gently and spoke in a carefully level voice:

“Oh, yes, if you please, sir, Mr. Rudd resides in a moderate-sized house on the outskirts of the village. It's called 'Ardpatrick.”

“After the horse as won the Derby two year ago,” broke in the old man.

“You will know it by the gate being tied up with string. It lies some distance back from the road, sir, and its garden runs down to the river.”

“Much obliged,” said Temple, returning all three smiles with a running glance.

The highstreet boasted of a hundred houses, less or more; old houses, with tiled roofs and Queen Anne doorways, small-paned windows and small patches of garden. Among them Temple saw “The Royal Duke,” “The Wheatsheaf,” “The George,” and “The Cat and the Fiddle,” by respectively, Fred Whimsey, George Attle, William Bugle, and Henry Ibstock.

He noticed that Weeley, the builder, also “furnished” funerals, and that Corby, the baker, shaved for three half-pence on Wednesdays and Saturdays, from two until nine.

At the end of the village the road widened out and made an irregular circle of the green, upon which young enthusiasts played cricket with coats for wickets, donkeys and butchers' horses munched the succulent grass, sheep followed the bellwether with timid haste, and geese waddled in single file.

Following the road to the left, Temple made his way past several pompous, but slightly podgy, Queen Anne houses, inclosed in high brick walls, past a row of neat cottages with thatched roofs, into a lane that led up to a low-lying house with dirty, but cheerful, windows, a much worm-eaten, but still plucky portico, a flight of stone steps, green and neglected, and a door whose knocker palpably stood in need of a screw.

There was no name anywhere to be seen, but the gate was tied up with a string.

As Temple entered, he burst into a gay, ringing laugh.

The knocker, to fulfill its duty, needed careful manipulation. To make it fall upon the knob of iron put there for that purpose it was necessary to swing it up on its own screw.

Temple had done this three times, and each time had hammered loudly. Yet he found himself, after the third trial, still upon the outside of the door. He jumped on to a neglected bed in which ragamuffin nasturtiums ran wild, and peered into one of the windows. He could make out a carpetless room, littered with books and papers, a large desk covered with dust and cobwebs, and several pictures, hanging at every angle but the right one.

But no Billy Rudd.

He followed a weedy path round the side of the house and found an open window. The room it lighted was evidently a favorite with the owner. A finely carved oak bookcase, bulging with books in wild disorder, stood against one of its walls. On one side of it—covered with pipes and tobacco tins, butterfly nets, and old numbers of “Ruff's Guide to the Turf”—was an oak table, and on the other a large, imposing French armoire of black oak. Its doors were open, disclosing three shelves. Their contents were picturesque. Books and bottles, boots and coats, plates, fishing tackle, old newspapers, and cooking utensils rubbed shoulders in cosmopolitan friendship.

Three much-worn rugs only partially covered the floor, upon which stood three shabby armchairs, stuffed with paper-backed books. The walls were closely covered with pictures of horses, cut from newspapers and tacked, frameless, in irregular lines. Under the table, Temple noticed several old bones, a tin saucer filled with water, and a half-eaten dog biscuit.

But no Billy Rudd.

With a kind of fright, Temple rapped his stick on the window sill.

“Billy! Billy!” he called.

His voice sounded hollow and echoed back to him.

“Billy! Billy!” And still there was no answer.

Suddenly a dog barked loudly in the distance. Temple whistled persuasively, and a half-bred wire-hair terrier came leaping through the long grass of the lawn.

“Hillo, Jack! Where's your master?” cried Temple.

With a gurgling bark of welcome, the dog, quick to make friends with a man he instantly recognized as “doggy,” leaped up again and again, licking Temple's hands and wagging a ridiculous stump of a tail until it looked like ten stumps.

Temple patted him for many minutes, talking the while to prove how agreeable his intentions were, and then said: “Find him, Jack, old boy! Find him!”

Instantly Jack made off in the direction of the river, and Temple followed him.

The garden was long and wide. Shrubs that looked as if they had never been trimmed stood knee-deep in rank grass. No paths were discernible, and flowers grew where seeds had been blown or dropped by careless birds. In the kitchen garden, gooseberry and currant bushes peeped over the feathery heads of grass, and fruit trees, laden with pears and apples, stood like gypsies. At the foot of this wild, ragged place slid the river, behind a line of willow trees whose branches bent over and touched its surface.

Again and again the dog ran backward and forward, till he led Temple to a place where the grass had been worn down. There he stopped, and, tail wagging and tongue hanging out, held up one paw.

With his arms under his hatless head, with the sun falling full upon his thin, well-cut, tanned face, lay a tall man, in a suit of discolored flannels, fast asleep, with a kitten rolled up in a ball on his chest. A woman would have noticed instantly that he had not shaved for several days.

By his side, handy to his right hand, lay five or six much-smoked pipes and a large tin of Wingate mixture. Open at the middle, its pages crinkled by the heat, lay a copy of “The Sentimental Journey,” and, closed, a small Homer, a collection of Browning's poems, the current Sportsman, and “Ruff's Guide.”

I introduce you to William Ormsby Massingham Rudd, gambler, poet, slackster.

For many minutes George Temple stood looking down on the face of the man who had been his Jonathan at Oxford; the man who had carried everything before him, whose brilliance and great heart and whimsical, untidy personality had won more than the admiration of all the men of his time; a man who had gone down from his university leaving behind him a reputation such as few men acquire, and with a career in front of him that everybody prophesied would carry him to the topmost rung of any ladder he set out to climb.

In Temple's smile there was affection, there was, too, a kind of unwilling admiration, but there was also just a shade of disgust. He felt as a man is bound to feel when, instead of finding a glorious cathedral towering to the sky, dignity in all its lines, beauty in its carving, he finds merely the foundations of it, crumbling, neglected, weed-covered.

It was ten years since these two men had met. The one had been in the world, strenuously working; the other out of it, studiously resting. A sense of shock came to Temple as he realized this, and, with a gesture of impatience, he bent over the calm sleeper and shook him almost angrily.

With a long, contented sigh, Billy Rudd opened first one eye and then the other. Before him, excellently well groomed, stood a vigorous, keen-looking man of thirty-two, whose face touched a chord in his memory that vibrated through his every vein. He sat up quickly, caught the kitten tenderly in his left hand, blinked, and rubbed his eyes. Then, with an immense shout, he clambered to his feet.

“Geordie, by the Lord Harry!” he cried. “Geordie! Geordie, my dear!”

I think there were tears in Temple's eyes as his hand was wrung again and again. In Rudd's eyes, however, there was nothing but sunny gladness, an almost childlike gladness, that lit up his whole body. He almost danced with delight. He placed the kitten inside his cap, which lay on the grass, and then caught hold of Temple with both hands and shook him affectionately, smacked his shoulders, and felt his muscles, and peered into his face anxiously, with almost paternal pride and concern.

“Oh, but this is tremendous!” he cried, throwing back his head, with a peal of laughter that set the dog barking and leaping, the birds singing, and filled the world with such a noise as never was. “Tremendous! Immense! Superb! If anything were needed to render me ridiculously, absurdly, dangerously happy, it's the sight of you! But how the devil did ye get here? How in the name of all that's wonderful did ye find me out? You can't have dropped from the skies. The angels would never have allowed such a good-lookin' beggar to leave. And you can't have sprung from the tower of the House of Commons, because you'd have been locked up for a lunatic. You motored, you villain! You had the audacity, the vulgarity, the blackguardism to sit in one of these evil-smellin', rattlin', coarse-minded, nasal-accented atrocities, and fly in the face of nature! If you have dared! Come, now, out with it, Geordie, my dear old Geordie! But never mind. I'll forgive you, however you came. The point is that you are come, and that I am beyond words delighted.”

Then he looked critically at Temple, who was laughing again.

“My dear,” he said, in an awed voice, “you've developed a presence. You're no longer a man; you're a personage. If I met you in the street, I should dig the nearest fellow in the ribs with my elbow and ask, 'Who's that?' How have you done it? You always were a fine fellow, but, by the Lord Harry, you're—almost distinguished now! I know how you've done it. You've lived laborious days. It's work—work, the ennobler; work, the counselor; work, the—ahem—damned unpleasant task-master! Hey, Geordie?”

He didn't wait for an answer, but suddenly taking Temple's arm, turned him around to the river.

“Look!” he said, throwing out his hand. “Mine, all mine! For ten years, winter and summer, spring and autumn—mine. I don't own them, but they own me. The river receives me into her embrace every morning of my life—when the sun shines. Every rat claims me for an acquaintance. Every bird you hear I have stood godfather to; and over the graves of many whose voices are heard no more in the land I have read the funeral service. Look at the frog. I have taught him Greek. He is the show gentleman of the chorus. A trifle sere and yellow, poor thing; needs careful dieting. And three owls, a married couple and the wife's spinster sister, come to my window sill every evening and blink at me as I sit reading—er—'Ruff's Guide.'

“You notice that I keep my grass long? I see you do, and that you don't like it. To tell you a secret, it pains me horribly to hurt anything that can't speak. I hate to see young, fresh things falling silently behind that ghastly implement of the devil, the scythe. And look—feel—how the sun chooses this spot to rest upon! For ten years we have been inseparables all the summer. I hate the winter. Jack and I stay in bed most of it, don't we, you rascal? Yes, Geordie, you find me a happier man, a far more contented man, than when we left each other in Paddington Station ten years ago. Why do you look at me so curiously? Haven't I shaved to-day? No, by the Lord Harry, I haven't!”

Temple caught hold of both Rudd's arms, held him tight, and looked straight into his eyes.

“Have you finished the great book you settled here to write, Billy?”

Billy's eyes fell. He gave his head a shake and then looked at Temple again.

“Oh, that thing? Come and see.”

Shaking himself free, he burst into a peal of laughter, made a series of jumps, like a great rabbit, through the grass, with Jack following in exact and delighted imitation, and sprang through the open window into his room.

Temple followed him into the house. He found Rudd flicking thick layers of dust from his desk with an old coat. A cloud hung around his head and shoulders and gradually settled down on them, turning them gray.

“Geordie!”

“Yes,” said Temple, remaining on the threshold.

“Come in, dear boy, come in! Wonderful dusty here! So much sun, bless him! This is my study. I work here—when I do work. Look!”

He lifted up, one after another, some thirty expensively bound manuscript books, each one carefully labeled: “The Rise and Decline of the Holy Roman Empire, by W. O. M. Rudd.” Vols. 1, 2, 3, and so on.

Braving the still-flying dust, Temple made for the books eagerly and opened the first volume at the first page. In a large, bold handwriting was printed, “Book One. The Rise. Chapter I.” And that was all.

He opened each of the twenty-nine remaining books. All their pages were spotless.

He looked up. Doubled up in a chair, in a veritable bath of dust, sat Rudd, in fits of laughter.

“Did ye ever in all your life see anythin' like it, Geordie?” he cried. “There you have me from A to Z. If I had bought one book at a time, very possibly—you'll note I say very possibly—I might have filled thirty of 'em. But those thirty, all in a prim heap, frightened the life out of me, and—don't repeat this—I don't think I came into this room twice after I had put 'em here.” He shuddered. “Come away. I feel as if I were in a catacomb.”

He took Temple's arm and led him into the sitting room.

“My dear Geordie, do forgive me! You must be starved! What a shocking bad host I am! Mrs. Linby! Mrs. Linby! By Jove, if this isn't just my luck! Dear Mrs. Linby—the good woman. who 'does' me, Geordie—has gone for a drive to-day. A funeral, I think. I couldn't refuse her. She'd set her mind on it. Do you mind potluck?”

Temple fell into a chair, limp with laughing. “Not I, old man.”

Rudd made an affectionate dash at him and gave him three or four punches. “Like the old days come back again, hey, Geordie?” he cried merrily. “With a difference. It isn't every one who has to provide for the appetite of an embryo prime minister. My ménage is on its mettle.”

He ran out of the room, leaving a trail of chuckles behind him. Temple listened. He heard Rudd plunge into the kitchen. He heard him fling open a cupboard. The words of the song he was singing in a thin, sweet tenor, came into the room:

Then a sudden silence.

Several minutes passed. Very quietly, with hair more ruffled than ever, Rudd reëntered the room. In his right hand he grasped a bundle of knives and forks; in his left, three plates, on the top of one of which sat a Dutch cheese and a loaf. Under his arm was a dirty tablecloth.

He swept a clear space on the table and dumped them all down.

“My dear Geordie,” he said, with a curious, whimsical smile, “though my fare is humble, it is nutritious, and it is thoroughly insular. It will be followed by as many excellent apples as you are capable of—grown upon the estate—and it can all be washed down with By the way, what do you drink?”

“Ale, Billy,” said Temple, entering into the spirit of the place.

“There is no village in the whole civilized world that can produce such ale as this one can and does!”

He jumped out of the window and ran around to the front of the house. Temple heard a whistle, and then another, and then a rustling of grass.

“Oh, Geordie! Do ye happen to possess a two-shillin' bit among your change?” Temple handed him one. “Thankee.” And then, from a little distance: “Ah, there you are, dear boy! I want you just to run down to the 'Cat and Fiddle' and ask Mr. Ibstock to give you half a dozen bottles of his superfine ale. Run there and walk back, and you shall be suitably and generously rewarded. One, two, three—go! A good boy, that, Geordie. A godson of mine. Bowls a magnificent round arm, with an invincible break to the off. Great future.”

While he spoke he was busily searching for a piece of paper. He found a clean half sheet, tore it in half, and pencil, writing something on it in handed it to Temple. It read:

“Oh, rot!” said Temple, flicking the paper into the air.

“No, no!” cried Rudd, catching it. “Business is business. You will kindly put that carefully into your notebook. And now to food.”

He cut two large chunks of cheese and two large corners of the loaf and plumped them down in the middle of the two plates. One he handed to Temple, the other he picked up and carried into the sun. Before he sat down he said, with a superb simplicity and earnestness: “For what I am about to receive, the Lord make me truly thankful. Now, then, Jack, die for your king.”

The whole afternoon these two men sat in the place where Rudd had been discovered, dipping back into the past, remeeting old acquaintances, revisiting old haunts, reviewing old failures and old triumphs. Together, in imagination, they paced the High and did the theater; raced, shouting, along the towpath; made speeches at bump suppers; got hopelessly idiotic at wines. With frequent gusts of laughter, they retraversed all the years of their intimacy, and then, under pressure, Temple told the story of his ten years' work, to a running accompaniment of encouragement, sympathy, and pride from Rudd.

As the sun reluctantly slipped lower and lower, Rudd moved around with it to catch its warmth. Finally, as it sank out of sight behind a burning bier of cloud, he stood up and kissed his hand to it and thanked it, with a whimsical sincerity, for its kindness, and asked it to be sure and remember that he needed it on the morrow.

But his high spirits sank with the sun. A restlessness seized him. Melancholy came into his eyes, and he hardly spoke for an hour. While Temple talked, he sat with his face in his hands, or moved in circles around his friend, with his chin sunk on his chest.

One by one the birds fell out of the orchestra. The great cantata of the day became gradually and gradually piano, and then melted into silence as the shadows deepened. Only a thrush, full-throated, remained awake, and, sitting on the bending branch of a willow, sent out its throbbing solo into the lulled world.

At last Rudd sat down, lit a pipe, and looked up with a smile at Temple.

“That was my bad time,” he said. “I hate to have the sun go. It always makes me feel lonely and deserted, and I begin to think of all that I ought to have done. If I possessed any whisky, I should have drunk deeply.”

Temple looked at him keenly, anxiously.

“Would you, Billy?”

“Don't run away with the notion that drink is my trouble,” Rudd hastened to add. “It isn't. I don't think I have ever been drunk since I came down from Oxford.”

Temple gave a relieved sigh.

“Oh, no. My dear Geordie, my trouble is utter, horrible, complete, delightful sloth. I am the laziest devil that ever was put into the world. I am the compleat slackster. 1 understand the whole gentle art of doing nothing superbly well. Give me sun and a day, and I'll conquer the world—on my back, in sleep. And yet, in a sense, it can't be called waste of time. I live every fraction of a second. To slack, in the subtlest meaning of the word, one must. During these ten years I have written miles of the most gorgeous verse.”

“Let me see it!” cried Temple eagerly.

“I've never committed it to paper, my dear,” replied Rudd. “It's here.” He tapped his forehead. “And then, too, how can they be said to be wasted years when at this moment I suppose there is hardly a man breathin' who knows as much of the speech, habits, manners, and moods of animal life as I do.”

“Write about it. Make it into a book for the use of other people,” broke in Temple.

“My dear Geordie, I've often debated with myself the advisability of doing so. But, you see, all these birds and beasts hereabouts are my friends, and it seems to me rather in the nature of caddishness to give them away. What would you say if I put you and Sir Robert Temple and Lady Temple into a book, and went into impertinent details as to the way in which you eat, drink, and wash yourselves?”

Temple laughed impatiently.

“But you must have done something! I don't believe that you have been lying on your back for ten whole years!”

“Something?” cried Rudd, with mock vehemence. “My dear, good fellow, I've done millions of things! I've been happy and contented. Everybody can't say that, for all that they have rushed and panted and fought and made money. Then, as you may have noticed, I've made Jack the first gentleman among dogs. Constant attention, constant sympathy and firmness required for that. The old Adam—if his name was Adam, and I don't suppose it was—remains in him from the tip of his tail to the tip of his cold nose. This kitten's mother I knew when she was even younger than her child. He is one of her fifth litter, You can imagine how busy she has made me. She lies under that syringa. Requiescat in pace—no pun intended.

“And,” said Temple quizzically, “according to report, you have backed horses?”

“Ah!” cried Rudd, leaning forward, with an added light in his eyes. “There you break the bottle and ring the bell! Racing is my chief hobby—call it a disease, if you like. I dare say it is. In fact, of course it is. If I had the money, I'd back horses in every race of the day on the flat and over the sticks. It's a foolish game, but it is a game, and I'm a fool. I started it ten years ago and I've never left off. At one time there was never a meeting that I didn't attend. But it took me a great deal away from home. Jack's father resented being left. There were those thirty books waiting to be risen and declined, and it cost too much money. So for about eight years I've raced from here. Ibstock makes a book, and the excitement of waitin' for the next mornin' is delicious!”

Temple glanced at the dilapidated house and imagined that he could feel the ridiculous I O U burning in his pocketbook.

“Have you done well, Billy?' he asked.

“I've had several spanking wins at ten to one—by a neck, and an eyebrow, and that kind of thing. But, on the whole, I suppose I ought to say that I have not done well. No, distinctly not. Emphatically not. From first to last, I think I ought to tell you that I've lost fifteen thousand pounds.”

Temple dropped his pipe. “What?” he cried.

“Yes,” said Rudd, with a quaint air of something uncommonly like pride. “Fifteen thousand pounds.”

“How appalling!” gasped Temple.

“No, no, my dear Georgie! No, not at all. I shall get it all back, y'know, get it all back, sooner or later. Luck, the firefly, has had me in her bad books—that's the whole truth of the matter. She disliked the look of me, and I don't wonder. But she's gettin' used to me now and my time is comin'.”

Instinctively, both men got up. Both were excited.

“I say, Billy,” said Temple, “I've told you everything. I've held back nothing from you. Tell me everything. I want to know.”

Rudd turned a perfectly bland, childlike face to his friend. “My dear Geordie, what is there to tell? Nothing.”

“There is, Billy. For one thing, look at the house. It's tumbling to pieces. Look at—at everything. It's all run to seed. Look at your clothes. They're frightfully shabby. And—don't be angry, my dear fellow, but I'll take my oath you don't get enough to eat. What's the meaning of it all?”

Rudd took Temple's arm affectionately and squeezed it.

“Your concern for me warms my heart, dear boy,” he said; “it really does. It's a good world that contains a man like you. A jolly good world! But, my very dear fellow, there's nothin' to worry about. As I say, I've devoted fifteen thousand pounds to the cultivation of a hobby. It's money lent, and for the moment I must confess to you that I am penniless, or, as we say in racin' circles, 'broke to the world.'”

“I thought so,” said Temple.

“Did you, dear feller? It's very kind of you, I'm sure. But, you see, this dear little place is my own, and Jack and I are not at all fussy eaters.? As you see, the garden is delightfully well stocked with fruit and vegetables, and when I want cheese and beer and tobacco, and somethin' to pay Mrs. Linby's small weekly account, I sell a few of my books and put the balance—a pound or two—on my fancy. It sometimes comes off, and when it does, I put all my winnings on another—and that goes down. But—don't you see?—at some period of a man's life his luck changes, and I am momentarily expectin' mine to change. When it does, and I take back my fifteen thousand and a little over, I shall rebuild the house. I've got all the designs ready. Such a study as never was, with bottle-glass windows! Until then”

“Well, until then?”

“Until then, my dear Geordie Well, the sun is shinin' and the birds are singin' and God's in His heaven. True, I've only recently sold the last batch of salable books and personal effects; but, as I say, Jack's appetite and mine are not those of epicures, and I must find other work for Mrs. Linby. The only thing I do very much regret is that I shall not have the money to back several most excellent things that are comin' along—which, as of course you will realize, is a great pity. Ah! There is Mrs. Linby! Come and be introduced. She's quaint, but she's as good as gold.”

Mrs. Linby was in deep mourning. Her round, chubby face struggled to adopt an expression of melancholy. The result was not a success. She merely looked like an orange balanced on a table napkin on top of a bottle.

“Enjoyed yourself, Mrs. Linby?” asked Rudd, patting her shoulder.

“I 'ave, sir, an' I'm ashamed to say it.”

“Good Lord! Why?”

“It's only the second time as I've rode in a kerridge—an' the first time was after Linby. I think this time the change did me more good than the first. The country were lovely an' the graves was beautiful an' everythin' went off as nice as nice. But, you see, sir, of course I had no right, as you may say, to enjoy myself, bein' a death an' all, although old Mrs, Burstal 'as been dyin' these five year an' was no friend of mine. I don't remember as ever I spoke to 'er—but the country were lovely and the graves was beautiful. I don't get a chance of seein' much of the world, and the kerridge was that black, an' the family 'ad some nice cakes”

“And it was a jolly holiday,” said Rudd, breaking in. “And old Mrs. Burstal is at peace. There is nothing to be ashamed about, Mrs. Linby.”

“Ah, well, sir, of course we ain't all alike. I shall regret 'avin enjoyed it this many a day.”

“Do, Mrs. Linby, do! I wouldn't advise your giving up an ounce of pleasure for worlds. This is my friend, Mr. George Temple, member for the Hackney division of Essex.” Mrs. Linby bobbed. “And he and I stand in need of supper. Will you see to it for us as quickly as you can?”

A look of panic passed over the woman's pippinlike face. She looked from one man to the other quickly, and got red, and fidgeted with her fingers.

“May I speak to you for a moment, sir?” she whispered to Rudd.

Billy was about to say yes, when a loud growling and scuffling came from the road.

“Jack's in trouble!” he cried, and disappeared on the run.

Temple blessed the Fates. His hunger immense, and his fear of wounding his friend's feelings even stronger. He took instant advantage of the situation.

“Oh, Mrs. Linby,” he said quickly, “Mr. Rudd said he would leave the supper to me. What do you say to going to the village and getting a meat pie at the baker's, some things for a salad, a bottle of whisky, some Cheddar cheese, pickles, butter, and some coffee?” He put a couple of sovereigns into her hand. “And I think perhaps you might slip away before Mr. Rudd comes back.”

Tears hurried into Mrs. Linby's eyes.

“God bless you, sir!” she said. “He needs it. It's long as 'e's 'ad anything of the kind.”

The agitated hurry in her walk made Temple laugh out loud. He watched her hesitate for a moment at the gate and then quickly sidle out and slip out of sight in the shadow of the wall.

Rudd rejoined him with an air of almost ludicrous pride.

“We won, Geordie,” he said. “Knocked him into a cocked hat. We got hold of his neck after bein' bowled over twice, and shook him like a rat. He's gone home very sorry for himself. I'm not sorry. For days he's been hangin' about and askin' for it. An impertinent Irishman with a dash of cockney. I expect he was cheekin' Jack about the length of his grass and the holy state of the portico. Eh, Jack? Look, Geordie!”

Rudd trod softly and pointed in front of him.

The moon had risen, and the earliest of all stars had shot into sight. The sky was one huge canopy of transparent blue above them. The motionless air was laden with a hundred scents. A sense of immense quietude gave the world the feeling of a great roofless cathedral. It seemed almost sacrilege to speak above a whisper. Everything was in its beauty sleep. The busy voices of birds and insects were still. Only the sound of water running over a distant weir could be heard. It was like the hushing of a mother as she rocked the cradle of her baby. Like frost, the silver of the moon outlined every branch and every leaf, and the shadows of them in the river looked as if they had been etched.

With his hand on Temple's shoulder, Rudd stood gazing, a sort of smile, half sad, half joyous, at the corners of his mouth. His other hand was raised, as if asking for silence. The light of the moon fell on his face. It was the same face that Temple had left ten years before on the platform at Paddington, but thinner, fined down. There was something about it to which Temple inwardly applied the words, “noble, aristocratic.” His hair, very slightly gray, had been thrust back from his forehead. It was the forehead of a poet, a musician.

A wave of tenderness came over Temple. “He is as simple, as guileless, as a bird or a flower.”

Rudd lit two candles, and put them on the table between himself and Temple. The light fell on two totally dissimilar faces—one determined, ambitious, clean-shaven; the other weak, gentle, childlike.

Rudd sat down. Jack curled himself up on the floor and, keeping one eye on Temple, rested his head on his master's square-toed right shoe. The kitten sprang on his shoulder and sat there, purring loudly.

Temple watched, with a tremor of anxiety, as a look of self-disgust, very unusual to it, settled on Rudd's face.

From the kitchen came the sound of some one moving briskly.

“Geordie,” said Rudd at last, “I wish you hadn't found me out.”

“Good Lord! Why?”

“The sight of you—a worker, a man who has done something, a man who will do much if all goes well—has disturbed me. You've made me feel like a sluggish pond, all covered with duckweed and water lilies, that has suddenly been stirred up with a pole. The sight of you has put a new construction on the way I have been living.”

“How?” asked Temple.

“For the first time for ten years I feel ashamed and humiliated. They are lost years, Geordie—years that I have willfully strangled. I wish to God that I had never seen this place and never put a shillin' on a horse! You have had reproof tremblin' on your lips all day. Fling it at my head now, as hard as you like.”

Temple thrust away a desire to save his friend's feelings and cleared his throat.

“I confess that to find you like this, Billy, has been a pretty rude shock. I came expecting to see a fine vessel.”

“And you find only an old boat lying upside down—the Billy Rudd, derelict.”

“Yes,” said Temple. “We expected great things of you. You were the coming man of our set. We were a mediocre lot. You were the man of genius.”

Rudd put the kitten on the table and sprang to his feet.

“I will burn my boats. I will begin again. I am only thirty-three, Geordie. Will ye help me? Is there any hope for me?”

“Will you leave this place?”

“Yes.”

“Will you leave off betting?”

“Yes.”

“Will you pull yourself together and work?”

“Yes, yes, yes! Give me work, and I'll show you. Give me your hand and hear my oath.”

Temple rose and stretched out an eager hand. There was something comically pathetic in Rudd's unconsciously dramatic attitude.

“I will never put a shillin' on a horse again, so help me God! It's a pity, because there are some absolute certainties loomin' on the horizon. However, it is over and done with. For the future I am a worker. I will cut the sun off my list of acquaintances. I will get out of the habit of slackin'. But you must take me away and keep an eye on me. Can you do that? Can you do that at once, before the determination wears off? For pity's sake, make an effort, Geordie! Don't let me slip back! Don't leave me here alone! Take me away! The river is brimmin' with the waters of Lethe, and if I bathe in it again, I shall forget.”

“I will take you home, Billy. I came down to-day to ask you to recommend a man who knows ancient history, to act as secretary to my father, who wants help in his book. You will be the secretary.”

“Oh, my Geordie, my dear Geordie! How am I to thank you? I will work my fingers to the bone. I will work till my eyes can't see. I will spare myself nothing. I will spend sleepless nights and live laborious days. Er—by the way, will it be very hard at first? Does the sun shine much in London? However, that doesn't matter. I will pull down the blinds.”

“Supper is ready, sir,” said Mrs. Linby.

Rudd took Temple's arm and led him to the table. His face was alight and his step elastic.

“Temple and Rudd,” he said proudly. “The workers. By Jove—yes, I will pull down the blinds!”

In the best of tempers with himself and the world, Sir Robert Temple sat at his desk, polished his glasses, folded into a precise square a new piece of green blotting paper, shifted the positions of his ink bottle, his penwiper, his sticks of sealing wax, and, dipping a new quill into violet ink, darted a contented look around the book-lined room and took up a bundle of notes. He read:

Sir Robert stopped abruptly. “Scepter, the daughter of Persimmon?” he asked himself aloud. “Nonsense! I must be dreaming!”

He took off his glasses and rubbed them, with a slightly agitated air. He then replaced them upon his well-shaped nose and examined the words closely.

“In Heaven's name, what will this man Rudd do next? George! George!”

“Hullo, sir!” sang out George from the next room.

“Come here, quickly!”

George Temple obeyed his father's order with his usual promptitude.

“Who was the grandfather of Caius and Lucius Cæsar?”

George gave a little laugh. “My dear father,” he said reproachfully, “I came down from Oxford ten years ago.”

“Augustus, wasn't it?”

“Why, of course! I remember now,” with the slightly overdone agreement of the man who is hopelessly at sea in regard to the subject under discussion.

“Precisely. Augustus. Take this sheet. What name is given there?”

George examined the page. “Scepter, daughter of Persimmon,” he said.

“That is the handiwork of your precious Mr. Rudd.”

George burst out laughing.

Sir Robert flung the offending sheet on the table and underlined the words with streaks of angry ink.

“I dare say it is a deficiency in a sense of humor that makes me wish to give way to coarse language. But I should like you to tell me what it is that you find laughable in so gross a mistake as this. How is it possible to turn 'Augustus' into 'Scepter'?”

“Anything is possible to a man of Billy Rudd's brilliancy.”

Sir Robert pounced upon the word as a thrush pounces upon a worm.

“Brilliancy!” he cried. “Brilliancy! If you define brilliancy as a unique power of filling in the simplest work with the most ingenious mistakes, as a method of rendering the names of well-known Roman personages into heathen English, then, in Heaven's name, give me a secretary as dull as ditch water! Who is Scepter, daughter of Persimmon? A music-hall acrobat?”

“She may be, sir,” said George. “It sounds to me uncommonly like the name of a mare.”

Sir Robert thrust his chair back and began to pace the room angrily.

“It may be,” he said, “that antiquarianism has warped me. But let me tell you there are times when this precious Rudd of yours fills me with the thrills of a prize fighter. I am sick of acting as secretary to my secretary.”

“But when he likes, sir,” said George, “there is no worker in the world like Billy Rudd.”

Sir Robert turned quickly and faced his son.

“Since you foisted him into this house he has not 'liked,' that's all. Work? Why, the little work he has done has been worse than useless. I give you my word that the greater part of his time is spent looking at the ceiling, with his feet upon his desk. It's my private opinion that this strange, whimsical creature your mother, your sister, you, and everybody else are so devoted to, is a confirmed loafer!”

“But, my dear father, in his time, Rudd was the ablest man at Oxford. The man”

“Of the greatest promise, who has realized none of it. Don't think that I dislike the fellow. I am sorry to say I don't. Me has a strange fascination about him that fills one with a queer pity. I am positively afraid of hurting his feelings. But if he doesn't end his career between sandwich boards, I shall be greatly mistaken.”

George put his hand on his father's shoulder. “He's my greatest pal, sir. Bear with him. He is very poor.”

Sir Robert flung out his hands. “That's just it. I know all that. I choke with horror at his ridiculous inaccuracy, and correct his mistakes with a smile. But it cannot go on, my dear George. It's—it's wearing me out. Look at me now! I'm a bundle of nerves! My book will never be finished—never!”

“I'm awfully sorry, father.”

“What can be done? Something must be done.”

“Where is Rudd now?”

Sir Robert sat down again. “Your mother sent him his breakfast in bed. I never get my breakfast in bed!'

“Is he seedy?” asked George anxiously.

“Seedy? Good heavens, no!” replied Sir Robert scornfully. “He's as strong as a horse—as strong as—as Scepter, daughter of Persimmon.”

George laughed, but encouraged a frown. “Leave the matter to me, father. I will speak to Rudd very seriously.”

Sir Robert looked at his watch, and crossed the room quickly to the door.

“Yes, do. It's time. And tell him from me, George, that if he wishes to write about horse-racing, he had better join the staff of a ladies' paper. And add, also from me, that the next mistake he makes he must pack up and go. But”—the old man turned and held up a warning finger—“but whatever you do, don't hurt his feelings!”

Neither of the men noticed the other door open during the last few minutes of their discussion, and so they did not see the look of fright come into the beautiful eyes of a young girl who stood just inside the door.

As her father banged the door, Sybil ran to her brother, holding a bunch of flowers behind her back.

“Who must go?” she asked anxiously. “Who was father talking about?”

“Scepter,” returned George, with a loud guffaw.

“Scepter?”

“Billy Rudd.”

She caught his arm. “Billy Rudd must go? Mr. Rudd must go? Oh, George!”

George put on a judicial air and passed his hand gravely down the back of his head. “The gov'nor was perfectly right, my dear Sybil. I believe you are all in love with him.”

“Why must he go? What has he done?”

“What has he done? I wish some one could tell me. He has been here a month, and the only thing he has done is to make egregious muddles of his notes and drive the gov'nor distracted. Poor, dear old Billy! What will become of him? I don't know—'pon my soul, I don't! He will not work. He wants to, he does his best to force himself, but it's physically impossible. I believe he's a slackster to his marrow. As a man in a practical world, he's a mistake. Out here he's a lark in a cage, beating his wings against the bars. And yet he'd have starved if I hadn't brought him away. He'd never borrow or beg.”

“Has he offended father? They seemed to be getting on so well!”

“The gov'nor is as much in love with him as any of us. But naturally he gets annoyed and irritable when he finds the names of celebrated race horses instead of those of Roman nonentities.”

“But he looks the most unhorsy man in the world!”

“So he is. He knows nothing about them, although he has thrown away fifteen thousand pounds in trying to prove that he does. Luck has been against him, he says. Luck is a kind of god of his.”

“If I believed in luck, I couldn't believe in God. Speak to him very seriously, George. Beg him to try to work.”

“I am going to,” said George firmly. “I've made up my mind to give him one or two straight from the shoulder. You wouldn't like to do it, would you, Syb?”

Sybil backed, laughingly, to the door. “I? No, thanks. You must. You're his greatest friend. He'll do anything for you. S-s-sh! I can hear him coming! Pitch into him, George. But do it gently, please!”

“Yes, yes! I will. Won't you stay?”

Sybil slipped the bunch of flowers into the bowl on Rudd's desk. “I must feed my canaries,” she said, and ran away.

“Yes,” repeated Temple to himself. “Straight from the shoulder. He must be made to pull up. He must realize that he is no longer playing, that he is filling a responsible post, and being paid for something he is not doing. I must hurt his feelings, I suppose. There's nothing else for it. I will say all these things to him firmly”—Billy coughed outside the door—“to-morrow.”

When Billy Rudd pushed open the door, the room was empty. His arms were full of books. He hurried in, with a grave, determined face and an air of immense responsibility. There was nothing of the old Billy Rudd about him. He no longer wore the old slack suit of discolored flannels. His coat was black, his trousers—pressed with the utmost accuracy—were dark, his boots were almost swagger, and his shirt was white. There was no three days' growth of beard on his chin; it was scrupulously well shaven. And his hair no longer stood about like a crowd of anarchists in the park, but was plastered down with brilliantine and cut short. The two months had made a difference of five years in Billy's appearance. He went straight to his desk.

“You there,” he said, placing a book, “and you there, and you—there. New pen and new piece of blotting paper. Nothing like order and method.” He sat down and drew his chair in with vigor. “Now for a day's work. A long day's”

He stopped. His eyes fell on the flowers in the bowl. His face flushed and his eyes gleamed.

“Scarlet and white! Cup day! My dream” He started up and paced the room feverishly. “It came out of the crowd of horses—white coat, scarlet cap—and won by three lengths Billy, you are a secretary to an antiquarian. Secretaries to antiquarians do not back horses.”

He returned to his desk and sat down again. As he dipped his pen in the ink, a glint of sun fell on his paper. He looked up. The blind was drawn. With an exclamation of disgust, he leaned forward, untied it, and hauled it violently up. The sun poured in upon him. He stretched out his arms and took a long breath.

“Oh, my sun!” he whispered. “My sun!” He dipped his face in it and let it fall on the backs of his hands.

“You gypsy, you slackster—you secretary!” he said, shaking himself angrily. “You are already several hours behind. Work! I say work!”

For the third time he sat down and dipped his pen. With a painful effort, he covered half a page with his fantastic spiral writing. The sun rested tenderly on his head. The pen gradually slackened.

“Oh, how warm, how comforting—how wrong!”

A smile spread over his face. Unconsciously he pushed his chair away from his desk, put his feet up on his books, his hands behind his head, and closed his eyes.

The sun fell upon his face.

I introduce to you William Ormsby Massingham Rudd, worker.

W. O. M. Rudd, worker.

“Out here,” said George Temple, “he's a lark in a cage, beating his wings against the bars.” He might just as well have said that he was a wild flower dug up from beneath a hedge and placed in a pet inside a conservatory. London—and Billy Rudd!

After lying on the bosom of Mother Nature for ten whole years of his life, hearing nothing but the simple chatter of her humbler children, seeing nothing but the exquisite effects of color as she changed her moods, to be plunged suddenly into the roar, the din, the rush of London, to find himself a mere straw in a swift, relentless river!

It was several weeks before he ventured into the main streets alone. He began by going out on George Temple's arm and clinging to it like a child, alternately dazed and delighted—awed and nervous always. To cross a road through an endless line of busses and cabs made him break into a perspiration. He went up one day to a policeman who stood, stolid and indifferent, on an island in the middle of Piccadilly and wringing his hand, said, “My dear, good feller, there's only one word for you—you're a genius!” And after that, greatly to their amusement, he made a point of touching his hat to every policeman he saw and passing the time of day with a smile of encouragement and admiration.

When he became more inured to the life, he would sometimes disappear for an hour, with a kind of yearning eagerness, into the quiet parts of Kensington Gardens; and people passing would stare curiously at the spare figure of the man with the simple face throwing crumbs to a collection of birds that treated him with familiarity and easy friendship. Or he would wander, with his hands behind his back, round the garden in the square in front of the Temples' house, followed by a stray cat to which he had extended his sympathy in the daily practical form of meat.

Some wonder had been aroused among the servants in the house because the cheese in the mousetrap they had set in Rudd's bedroom was always missing, although the trap was down. When the butler ventured to point out the curious fact to Rudd, he was received with indignant reproaches.

“My dear, good man, you don't suppose I'll sit by and watch my little friend walk into the guillotine, do you? The cheese goes each day because I take it out and hand it to the little chap, and the trap goes down because I kick it down.”

It was not difficult to see that respectable clothes were very irksome to Rudd. He found shaving every morning a severe penance, and the hours he spent several days a week in the reading room of the British Museum brought on deep dejection. Nevertheless, he was not unhappy. Lady Temple and Sir Robert were exceedingly kind, and he appreciated their kindness fully. He unconsciously regarded Sybil as an angel, and watched her, as she moved about the house, with a sense of admiration too strong to put into words.

He strained every nerve to get back into the habit of working, and in the small hours of the morning flung at himself many scathing terms of opprobrium for his inability to settle down.

Many times, in the middle of the night—when, throwing open his window and finding no garden and no river, no whispering branches silvered by the moon, but only roofs and chimneys, he would be assailed by a fearful melancholy—he would creep down to the basement, where Jack was quartered, and sit down upon the floor and hold the dog's sympathetic paw, and talk to him in whispers of all that they had lost. The result was always the same. When he rose and retraced his steps to his room, it would be with a high head and squared shoulders.

“Yes, yes, there's only one way. I must pull down the blinds—and keep them down, for Geordie's sake.”

There was a beautiful smile on Rudd's face when Minch entered the study quietly. His feet were still on his desk and his hands still clasped behind his head. The sun poured in upon him. He was sleeping like a child. The blind was up.

Minch, who had found him many times in this attitude, was unable to make up his mind as to whether Rudd was sleeping or in deep thought. He coughed judiciously. Rudd made no movement. Then he shifted a chair with some noise. Rudd opened his eyes.

“Eh?” said Billy, with a start. “Oh, it's Minch. How are you, Minch? How are you?”

“Do I disturb you at your work, sir?”

“You do, Minch, you do, undoubtedly.”

Minch backed to the the door. “I ask your pardon, sir.”

“I thank you,” replied Rudd gravely.

“I will disturb you again, sir, when you are less busy,”

The butler rattled the handle of the door, but did not open it.

He had frequently gone through precisely the same set of questions and answers.

Rudd swung his feet off the desk and lolled them over the arm of his chair

“No, Minch, no! Come here! I like being disturbed at my work. It's a—a change.”

“Indeed, sir?”

“Work, my good fellow, work is all the better for being disturbed—that is, brain work, work demanding concentration. You found me very concentrated, Minch.”

“Yes, sir.” Like all carefully trained servants, Minch had a horror of seeing the sun playing upon the carpet. He moved to the window and pulled down the blind.

“My good man,” cried Billy, “what are you doing?”

“The sun takes the color out of the carpet, sir, so”

“Oh, but you mustn't do that. Hang the carpet! Hide the sun—from me! Up with the blind, Minch, up with it!”

“I beg your pardon, sir.” The blind went up again.

Rudd laughed. 'No, no, don't beg my pardon. Beg my dear friend's pardon. The sun and I are sworn friends—from childhood. Ah, to be lyin' on a haystack, with poppies noddin' their tanned faces at me, with the smell of Mother Earth in my nostrils, with a well-worn pipe in my mouth, and a whole day to smoke away!”

He changed his attitude quickly and leaned over the desk, grasping his quill.

“But I'm a busy man now, Minch, All that kind of thing is over and done with.” He pointed to his books. “Look at these! Fossils, my friend, dry crinkled, fusty fossils! Most interestin', most absorbin', most-awfully dull! What paper's that you've got there?”

“The Sportsman, sir. All the finals for to-day's big race. I thought you might like”

Rudd waved it away emphatically. “Certainly not! Most certainly not! I'm no longer interested in How many starters are there?”

The butler silently opened the paper and handed it to Rudd.

“Minch, no! Emphatically!” He took the paper. “Emphatically no Seventeen, by the Lord Harry! Minch, last night I had a dream about this race.”

“No, sir?” said the butler eagerly.

“I did, indeed! Whether it was the Welsh rabbit, of course, I can't say. I don't really know. The fact remains I had a dream. I saw the start, a blur of rapid colors. I saw one animal shoot ahead like a bird, maintain a steady lead, dash along the straight like a sheet of lightnin', and whistle past the post three lengths ahead.”

Minch became intensely excited. “Did you see the colors, sir?”

Rudd opened his mouth to reply, shut it again with an effort, and bent over the desk. “I am sorry, but you are disturbing my work. I am very busy.”

“I beg your pardon, sir, but the colors were”

“Scarlet and white—three lengths ahead!”

“Scepter, sir, by Jingo!”

“Yes, yes? Scepter?”

“It was a certainty before, sir, but now”

“It's an investment, eh, Minch, eh?”

“It can't help itself, sir.”

Rudd scratched his ear with the feather of the quill and laughed in his peculiar, whimsical way. “For ten years I've backed horses that were called investments—and lost a fortune. But a dream, Minch, eh? That's good enough, don't you think?”

Minch trembled with excitement. “Good enough, sir—Lord!”

Rudd got up and began pacing the room. “When I was a boy, I fell in love, madly, ardently. I was eleven or twelve, or possibly thirteen. But that's of no consequence. The lady—a sweet thing—turned somersaults in a circus, in tights. Her name was Laura. I've backed horses named Laura ever since—and lost. But luck is like a woman. She laughs at one, flouts one, turns her pretty back on one, but if one follows her long enough, whatever the weather, however rough the path, she turns around and smiles at last. Smiles? Beams, beams!

“Mr. Temple wrung an oath out of me never to bet again. Of course, what I meant was never to bet again on an uncertainty. But how the devil can this be called an uncertainty, when in my dream I saw scarlet and white, and those colors are to be mounted on such a mare as Scepter? Mr. Temple doesn't understand these things. In my opinion, it would be puttin' an insult on Luck she could never forgive not to take advantage of a thing like this! It is a thing to back, to back heavily.”

“Shall I do so for you, sir?”

“Don't be foolish, my man. Most certainly you shall. My shirt shall go upon her. I feel that I have caught up Luck at last, and that she is beaming, beaming.”

He almost ran to the door.

“Where are you going, sir?”

“To get my shirt, Minch. She beams, she beams!”

“Mr. Rudd, Mr. Rudd!” cried Lady Temple, bustling in a moment later. “Ah, poor fellow! I suppose he's not down yet.”

“Poor fellow!” scoffed Sir Robert, following with George and Sybil. “Do you hear that, George? Look at the clock!”

“It is late,” assented Lady Temple reluctantly. “But you must make allowances. He works so hard. That is, he never leaves this room except for meals and an occasional walk.”

Sybil caught sight of the Sportsman on Rudd's desk. Seizing an opportunity, she pounced upon it, scrunched it into a ball, and dropped it into the waste-paper basket.

“What was that?” asked George.

“The Sportsman,” she whispered.

George suppressed an irresistible desire to laugh, but he looked at his sister keenly. Was it possible

Sybil caught the inquiry she saw in his eye, and, with a flush, turned quickly to her mother. “I say, mother,” she said, “what's the surprise you have in store for us?”

Like a very delightful hen, Lady Temple spread herself out and opened the current number of the Times exultantly.

“She has found a receipt for a new pudding,” said Sir Robert.

“New pudding!” laughed Lady Temple. “Nothing of the kind!”

“Some one has written that George is the coming man,” teased Sybil.

“That's not in least necessary. Everybody knows it.”

“Some one has discovered that the world is an oblong,” said George, putting his hand affectionately on the gray-haired lady's shoulder.

“I shouldn't in the least mind if some one had discovered that it was a jujube. As a matter of fact, it is something that will interest you very much. It is the speech George made in the House last night, reported in full.”

“But I didn't speak last night,” said George.

Lady Temple smiled up at him. “No? Well, here it is.”

“Let me read it, my dear,” said Sir Robert.

“No, I will read it myself. Sybil, get my glasses.”

Sir Robert handed her his own. “Use these, my dear.”

“Where are they, mother?”

“I haven't the least idea,” replied lady Temple blandly. “I believe I had them in the morning room last. Did I, do you know, George?”

Sir Robert kept his eyes eagerly on the paper. “Try the drawing-room, Sybil, my dear, while your mother hunts in her pocket.”

“Oh, they are not in my pocket, I know. I think, as a matter of fact, that I left them between pages a hundred and twenty and a hundred and twenty-one of the book I was reading in your room, Sybil, in the chair in the left-hand corner of the window by the fireplace. Or they may be in the conservatory on the lower shelf near the door.”

Sybil went quickly to the door. “All right, mother. Only don't read till I come back.”

Lady Temple brought the glasses out of her pocket. “Oh, Sybil, I have found them.”

“Ah!” said Sir Robert.

“It's no use your sayin, 'Ah,' my love, because you're every bit as bad as I am with your glasses.”

“The speech! The speech!” cried the old gentleman.

Lady Temple shook open the paper. “'Scandal on the Stage'—that's not it. 'The Cotton Crisis'—that's not it. 'Absconding Solicitor'—that's”

“Not it,” said Sir Robert. “Allow me.”

“My dear Robert, pray do not be so impatient. I have read this paper every morning since George went into the House, and I can put my finger on anything I want to find, in the dark. 'Proceedings in Parliament.' Ah, here it is!

“There! Kiss me, George!”

George broke into a great laugh. He was joined by Sir Robert.

Lady Temple looked at them in surprise.

“Why do you laugh?” she asked. “I think it is extremely well put. I'm certain your honorable friend felt extremely crushed, George.”

She rose and kissed him, with pride and tenderness.

“And now, if you please,” said Sir Robert, seating himself at his desk, “I will resume my work.”

Lady Temple turned to him, with a sweet smile. “Oh, no, dear. You and I are going to the Army and Navy Stores. Don't you remember?”

“Wild horses shall not drag me to that horrible place!”

“But I arranged it with you last night. You are going to help me choose the new curtains for the kitchen.”

Sir Robert spluttered. “Curtains are a mystery to me, and I will not go.”

“And,” resumed Lady Temple, sailing over her husband's emphatic remarks, “we will bring back some nice cakes for tea.”

“My dear,” said the exasperated and distinguished historian, with much feeling, “I do not intend to go.”

“Run along, darling,” added charming wife, quite unmoved by his determined manner, “and wear your new tall hat.”

Sir Robert looked at his wife angrily, caught the affectionate, but unargumentative, look in her eyes, laid down his pen like a lamb, and quietly left the room.

There are some people who will agree with Lady Temple that it did Sir Robert and the world in general far more good to help in the selection of kitchen curtains than to write grave things about prehistoric Romans, of whom nobody wanted to know. On the other hand, there are some people who will not. For himself, after he had recovered from the first shock of the trivial and domestic nature of the request that was a command, and from the fact that, although the command was issued by his wife, she was a woman, and so quite out of count in interfering with the arrangements of a man, Sir Robert took an almost childish delight in trotting at the heels of the beautiful old lady, with her unconsciously royal bearing and charm of manner.

When the door closed upon them both, George turned, with chaff upon his lips, toward his sister. She was standing by the window—tall, straight, and simple—looking out and seeing nothing. Her fingers were linked together in front of her. The sun fell down upon her pretty head and set her hair alight.

“Syb,” said George softly, taking hold of her elbows.

“Well?”

“I believe you're in love.”

“I don't believe it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I know it.” A little smile played around her lips, but her eyes were grave and steady.

“Syb.”

“Well?”

“Are you sure it's wise?”

“Wise! I haven't asked myself that. I am only sure that it is love.”

George turned her round, looked into her eyes for a moment, and kissed her. When he got to the door, he laughed.

“Well,” he said, “everything seems to be because of Billy Rudd.”

Sybil felt like a bird when it suddenly discovers that it can fly. For many days she had been filled with a new sense of power, but she had been afraid—as a bird is afraid to use its wings—to give it a name.

The thought that Billy Rudd might be sent away by her father brought her face to face with the truth. She couldn't bear to let him go. She was afraid to confess even to herself that this was love; but when George asked her point-blank, the confession trembled from her heart to her lips, as a bird flies into the air.

For a long time—with the little smile playing around her lips, but with grave and steady eyes—she sat staring in front of her, seeing all the familiar objects about the room—all the past, the present, and the future—from a different point of view. She made no attempt to idealize the man she loved. She only summed him up for all that he was worth, and multiplied it by two. She knew that he had no money and would be likely to have none. That fact only filled her with a sense of pleasure. It was for her, it was her own particular work in life, to use her influence in order to turn his brilliant capabilities to account. She knew he was very weak. She smiled when she thought how strong she was, and how delightful it would be to give him her shoulder as a support. She laughed as she considered the untidiness of his clothes and the carelessness of his appearance, but her lips trembled when she thought of his big heart, his for dumb things, his thoughtfulness simplicity and generosity.

Like all women, she loved the man much more for what he had not than for what he had. His faults and his failings were much more dear to her than his strong points. She could give him the things he did not possess by her quiet influence, her constant example. If she succeeded in mending his faults and failings, he would be far more hers than if he came to her a man with nothing to mend. To such women and they are not so scarce as people say—a man's character is like his wardrobe. They turn it over without any very great interest until they come upon something that needs a button or that has come undone at the seam. Then they load their needles and, with eyes alight, sit down to repair. And they will sew on the same button and darn the same seam a thousand thousand times without a word or a sigh, for God touched their hearts with His finger and left there the knowledge of love.

When Billy Rudd came back to the study, he crossed to the desk in a kind of run, and, with a chuckle, threw down a five-pound note upon it.

“The last,” he said to himself gayly, “the last! The odds are ten to one. If this doesn't all point to the fact that Luck is tired of showing me her heels, then I'm a Dutchman, and will never have a shilling on a horse again. If it wins—as it inevitably will—then, my dear Geordie, I am very sorry, but it will mean that I shall be obliged—if I'm to show my loyalty and gratitude to the jade who's teased me all these years—to go on till I've won back fifteen thousand, pounds. I'll stop there. I want no one else's money, but”—he took one of Sybil's flowers up and kissed it—“I do want that.”

Sybil, whose heart gave a leap as she watched him, saw him sit down feverishly at the desk and heard him working out a sum aloud.

“Five at ten to one is fifty. How long will it take, putting fifty on ten to ones at a time, to get fifteen thousand? Thirty? Only thirty? By the Lord Harry, I ought to get it all back in a month or two at the”

He looked up suddenly and saw Sybil.

“Miss Sybil,” he asked, jumping up and going over to her, “what would you buy for yourself if you had fifteen thousand pounds in your pocket? A new hack, a diamond bracelet, a pearl necklace?”

Sybil laughed. “It's no use thinking about it, because I haven't got fifteen thousand pounds in my pocket.”

“But I have,” cried Billy. “I have. At least, I shall have in a month or so. Two months at the latest. What a lark, eh? W. O. M. Rudd, with fifteen thousand pounds chinkin' in his pocket again! Do you believe in luck?”

“No,” said Sybil.

“But have you ever given the matter your earnest consideration?”

“Not very earnest; but I don't believe in it.”

“My dear Miss Sybil, you amaze me, you astound me, you take my breath away! Why, do you know that, but ,for luck, you and I might be white mice or Chinese, or that I might be a poor devil of a millionaire, with a horrible stucco place near to other horrible stucco places in Park Lane, and never be able to poke my nose out of my door for fear of people pouncin' down and askin' for money? Why, good gracious me! Luck plays as great a part in life as it does in—cricket. Take me—just take me, as an example.” He began to laugh. “Why, do you know, my dear Miss Sybil, that on the day Geordie dropped from the clouds into my garden, I hadn't twopence to rub together in the world? What sent him to me, of all people? Luck, of course.”

“No. Father wanted a secretary with a great knowledge of ancient history, and George thought of you.”

“What made him think of me? Luck, of course.”

“No, your knowledge of ancient history.”

“Well, but me knowledge of ancient history is due to luck.”

“Oh, no; to work.”

Rudd gave a great laugh. “Heaven knows it wasn't work,” he said. “I never work. I must have inhaled it from my pipe. Oh, by the way, the word 'work,' the horrid, necessary word, reminds me. May I be excused?”

“Of course.”

Rudd looked down at Sybil for a moment with immense admiration and respect, shook himself, shot out a little sigh, and returned to his desk.

“Most interesting,” he said, “most absorbing, most awfully dull.”

He wrote hard for perhaps ten minutes.

Sybil, still with the smile playing round the corners of her mouth, sat looking out of the window. Presently she looked around and found Rudd watching her, his chin resting on both hands, the quill in his mouth.

“I shall fade away if I disturb you,” she said.

“Because I ought to work, oughtn't I?”

“Yes, very hard.”

“As you say, as hard as hard. Well, well.”

He plunged again, his pen making a noise like a creaking door.

After sitting very still for a moment or two, Sybil crept to the window and let down the blind.

Rudd looked up quickly. “Thank you, Miss Sybil, thank you! I was beginning to find the sun very tiresome, very tiresome, indeed. You're not going, are you? Oh, don't go!”

Sybil turned, with her hand on the door handle. “Don't you think I'd better? I know you want to do as much as you can to-day, and I feel that I am disturbing you.”

Rudd laughed. “Quite right. You are disturbing me. It's very, very good of you.” He got up and went over to her. “If I tell you a secret, will you promise me solemnly never to say a word?”

“Most solemnly,” said Sybil.

“Miss Sybil, I hate work like poison.”

“Oh, but that's no secret. Everybody knows that.”

“Everybody knows—what?” asked Rudd slowly.

“That you hate work like poison.”

“Who is everybody, if you please?”

“Why, the daisies, your pipe, the ceiling, the sun, Jack, George, mother, father, and I.”

“How? Tell me.”

Sybil pretended to think it over. “Well, you see, when a person is very fond of work, he gets through a great deal of the work he is very fond of; but when a person is not very fond of work, he doesn't get through a great deal of the work he isn't very fond of.”

“Well?”

“And when a person is not very fond of work, and doesn't get through any of the work he is not very fond of, nobody can possibly say that he is very fond of work, can he?”

A horribly sad look came into Billy's gray eyes. “Is it as apparent to people as all that? Why can't I discipline myself? What's wrong with me? Am I so utterly and hopelessly far gone in sloth?”

He paced the room in a fever of self-disgust, too unself-conscious to be aware that he was baring his soul to the one woman in the world in whose eyes he wanted to stand well.

“I ought to have been born a barge horse. Then I should have known how to work. As it is, I think I must have been born between sunset and moonrise, that horribly quiet time of the day when even cows stop chewing and birds hold their tongues! Miss Sybil, can you suggest some punishment for me that will sting me into working? Is there no way in which I can be forced? Yes, there is! If you were to be angry with me, if you were never to speak to me, if you were to treat me with silent scorn, and be kind to me no more—I should work my fingers to the bone for a look from you. Will you do it, as a last resource?”

He stood in front her with trembling lips.

Some one tapped at the door and entered. It was Minch.

“I beg your pardon, sir, but have you”

“Oh, yes, yes, Minch,” said Rudd. “I brought it down.”

He turned eagerly, without thinking, to the nearest desk—it was Sir Robert's—and caught up a note that was lying face downward upon it—it was for fifty pounds—and handed it to Minch.

“Be quick,” said Rudd. “You have only just time.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Minch gravely.

When the door closed, Rudd turned to Sybil, who was looking out of the window. His mood had changed again. He was once more the old, sunny Rudd, with dancing eyes and whimsical smile.

“Miss Sybil, I shall be able to show you, within half an hour, whether there is such a thing as luck in the world. Before you can say, 'Jack Robinson,' I shall be in possession of all the money I have lost. It isn't much, but it is enough. Give me your hand. I want to make you a solemn promise.”

She gave it.

“I hereby swear to you by all that I hold sacred in life, that when I have got back my money again, I will slack no more. I will go back to the country with Jack—I do hope Mrs. Linby is looking after the kitten—but not to lie on my back in the sun. I will go back and begin my book. Have you a photograph of yourself that you could spare? A full-face photograph, with eyes looking straight ahead?”

“Yes,” said Sybil.

“If you will honor me with one, I will put it on my desk—it shall be dusted—where you shall always be looking at me to see that I keep my word, and under your eyes my book shall grow till the thirty volumes are full. Is that a bargain?”

“Yes,” said Sybil.

He pressed the little hand gently, and dropped it. There was a great tenderness in his eyes as he looked at her.

“The book will be called “The Rise and Decline of the Holy Roman Empire,' by W. O. M. Rudd. It will have another title in my mind. Can you guess it?”

“No,” said Sybil.

“'The Decline and Rise of W. O. M. Rudd,' by Sybil Temple.”

He turned on his heel abruptly and sat down at his desk.

If ever there was a man in this world who longed to say, “I love you,” to a woman, that man was Billy Rudd; and if ever there was a woman who longed for a man to say it, that woman was Sybil Temple.

But the silence was broken only by the passing wheels of a cab, the shrill whistling of an errand boy, and the scratching of a quill pen.

When Sir Robert returned in the early afternoon, he found his secretary absorbed in his work, with the blind down. It was the first time he had come into the room and not discovered his son's friend lying back in his chair with his feet on his desk and the sun playing on his face.

The sight added to the old historian's already excellent temper. With a smile, but without a word, he, too, sat down, and the scratching of another quill made a duet of what had been an ardent solo.

If Sir Robert had been able to see Rudd's face, I do not think he would have taken up his work so quickly and become lost in it so soon. He would have seen a look upon it that neither he nor any other man had ever seen before—a look of pain and bitterness, of pleasure and delight.

Before he turned abruptly on his heel and left Sybil standing by the window, something fell away from Rudd's eyes, and he realized, with a kind of fright, that he didn't merely admire and respect his friend's sister, but that he loved her with all the ripe love of a man who has loved no other woman.

He had never made his extracts so accurately or so swiftly, yet he couldn't have told you a single word that he had written. His thoughts were racing alongside of his pen. He said to himself emphatically that it was impossible, impossible, impossible, and must never be breathed to a soul. His love would have to be like the root of a tree, always spreading, but never seen. All the same, it was this that he had needed. He had asked himself and Sybil that very morning what was wrong with him, why he could not discipline himself. Here was the answer. He had never loved a woman. He had never known what it was to throw himself, heart and soul, into something that was irksome to him, for the sake of a woman.

He knew that everything was changed now. He knew that neither the sun nor his old habits would stand any longer in his way. She would never know it, but no soul on earth could undo the knowledge that had come to him, that he had some one for whom to work, some one to whom to dedicate himself. It was characteristic of his simple, unegotistical nature never to give a thought to the question whether there was the least hope for him, any more than, in loving the sea, he wished to possess it as his own. It was enough for him that he loved.

Lady Temple came in, unheeded by him, and sat down by her husband's desk. They talked together in low tones sometimes, or Sir Robert read little bits of the great book, while Lady Temple nodded her approval and encouragement, without, possibly, understanding a word.

Presently, hearing Rudd's chair pushed violently back, they both looked up. They saw him standing in front of his desk, holding a bank note in a trembling hand, his face white and horror-stricken.

Before either could say anything, Minch quietly entered, and, handing Rudd a slip of paper, left the room silently.

They saw Rudd read the slip feverishly, and watched it drop from his hands.

“Oh, my God! My God!” they heard him cry, and then they saw him stagger like a drunken man out of the room.

On the slip of paper were the names of three horses. Scepter's name came second,

That evening, Sir Robert and Lady Temple dined alone in silence.

Sir Robert had received a note an hour before, written in a shaking hand. It ran as follows:

Sybil had been out with Jack all the afternoon. They had been through Kensington Gardens to the Round Pond, where Jack, in order to amuse a person he knew to be a friend of his master's, good-naturedly consented to fetch back the sticks she threw into it.

The tame flowers, carefully arrayed like school children, gave out a blaze of color. The old elms, in the correctly cut grass behind the railings, nodded primly to them as they passed. And the birds, full of London assurance, barely made way for them as they followed the path by the evergreens. Across the stretch of rail-divided turf, topping the border of trees, the sky line was broken by the placid and mature chimneys of the palace, the worn red of whose smooth bricks gleamed in the sunlight. Over the sharp chirping of sparrows and the sweet-pitched song of the linnet rose the ever-present roar of the traffic, deadened slightly by intervening trees and bushes.

The world went very well with Sybil and Jack. For the one, because she had found the key that opens the secret door of a woman's heart and because she knew that the man she loved loved her. She had seen it leap suddenly into his eyes and tremble on his lips. She liked him better for turning on his heel.

For the other, because, even though Kensington Gardens were prim and precise, and impudent men in uniforms with medals stood about to see that dogs kept off the flower beds, they were better than the basement of a London house, so well kept and regulated as not to provide even the excitement of an occasional rat. After all, grass was grass, and water was water, although it was not the grass of Ardpatrick or the water of the upper Thames.

Sybil returned, to be told by her mother that Mr. Rudd had received a shock that neither she nor Sir Robert could understand.

Sir Robert had discovered hat his note for fifty pounds was missing, but he had made no comment. He had only sat in a state of fidgety sympathy, and had twice been up to Rudd's room without having the courage to go in and tell him that whatever he had done made no difference, that he was welcome to as many fifty-pound notes as Sir Robert could spare—for George's sake and for his own.

Lady Temple had herself made tea and carried it into the study, and had sat near Rudd's desk, with a dish full of his favorite cakes placed in a conspicuous place.

But no Billy Rudd had appeared to eat them.

Without waiting to hear all these things—having noted, with the alert instinct of a woman, a curious sense of stillness about the house—Sybil ran up to Rudd's room two steps at a time. To her quick knock no answer was returned, and she pushed open the door.

The room was empty.

The few possessions Billy had brought with him or bought since he came were gone. The drawers were half open, and an empty collar box, with its lid off, lay dejectedly in the fireplace.

No one had seen Billy Rudd creep out of the house, carrying his bag in one hand and his hatbox in the other, except his friend, the stray cat, which had been sitting with its head stuck out between the railings of the square. It had risen, with an erect tail and arched back, at the sight of him, filled with pleasant anticipations of favors to come, and had watched the figure with the hanging head slip quickly away.

And so that evening Sir Robert and Lady Temple dined alone, in silence, because Sybil, pleading headache, had gone to her room, and Billy Rudd had gone away.

Sybil lay face downward on her bed, crying her heart out, while Jack sat as near the door as he could, watching and listening, with an occasional shifting of feet and involuntary whimper.

Billy Rudd, a bag in one hand and a hatbox in the other, made his way hurriedly through darkening London, over Blackfriars Bridge, with hanging head.

It is no easy-thing for a man of ordinary intelligence, who doesn't mind to what he puts his hand, to starve in London, unless he wishes to commit suicide. One constantly reads heart-rending stories of starving people. But they belong to that curious set the members of which either can't work or won't put their hands to any kind of work that they consider beneath their dignity. They have some pride left, they say, and so continue to beg, borrow, or steal.

It has been said by sweeping assertionists that the bath-chair men at seaside places are largely recruited from the ranks of the double firsts and senior wranglers. And it is not merely a picturesque way of speaking to say that Rowton's are houses filled with ex-army officers, broken-down professional men, pensioned civil servants, played-out journalists, out-of-work actors, and men whose parents committed the greatest mistake of their lives when they sent their sons to one of the universities. But these men, however badly luck has served them or ill health has treated them or self-indulgence has reduced them, do not starve. By hook or by crook they are able, by all sorts of ingenious dodges, honest and dishonest, to live in the poor man's hotel and keep their heads above water.

When Billy Rudd arrived at one of Rowton's houses, he had exactly three suits of clothes and their necessary accompaniments, half a dozen books, and forty-eight shillings, to bless himself with.

That evening he paid his fee and cooked his own supper among many better and many worse men than himself. He did so in a dazed way, looking and feeling like a man who had received a blow between the eyes. And that night he lay upon the bed allotted to him, with staring eyes and aching heart, horror-stricken, humiliated, and very humble, but, as the day broke and the early light crept quietly in, with a determination running through his veins that had never been there before in his life.

“Now,” he cried inwardly, clenching his fists, “I will work, and the blind may remain up or down as it wills. Now the time has come when Billy Rudd must dream away his days no longer. I will not rest until that money is repaid. If no paper will give me work, I will sell it on the office steps. The father of my oldest friend shall not lose one penny by me.”

In his Oxford days, Rudd had contributed several articles on his own pet subjects to the weekly and daily papers, for which he had received good and honest payment. Knowing nothing of present-day journalism, he looked to Fleet Street to provide him with a living. Accordingly, having cooked his own breakfast, he bought a copy of all the daily papers, except those given over to finance and sport, and studied them carefully. He came to the conclusion pretty quickly that it would certainly not be a difficult matter for an educated man who willfully descended to journalism, to keep his head well above the stream, if the illiterate, cheap stuff he found in the morning papers was all that was required. The only thing that gave him the slightest uneasiness was whether he could possibly manage to write down to such a level.

He called at several of the newspaper offices day after day without result. With each journey to Fleet Street his depression grew deeper, and his small stock of shillings decreased daily. The callousness of London chilled him to the bone, but his determination never left him. Before returning to Blackfriars Bridge Road each night, he never missed passing the windows of the Temples' house and removing his hat.

He woke one morning, to find himself possessed of three shillings. He had made up his mind to get work without the aid of any of his former friends, but now he took his pride in both hands and flung it in the air, and tramped humbly over the bridge that leads from the south to the west.

Lord Shefford had been in his college at Oxford. Rudd had read that he was the proprietor of a weekly paper devoted to literature and politics. In his time he had drunk Rudd's hock cup and smoked his tobacco and borrowed his money. There was a possibility of his remembering.

On the door of 299 Grosvenor Square there was a small brass plate on which the words “Knock and Ring” were printed. Rudd had only the courage to ring.

Before the door opened, he took out his last card, scratched out his initials, and wrote over them the word “Billy.” This he duly handed to the butler, who, leaving him in the hall, reluctantly disappeared.

“He won't see me,” thought Billy. “A junior cabinet minister is far too big-a wig to remember old days. It will be back into the streets, Billy, back into the streets! There are always matches to sell and sandwich boards to carry”

“Billy! Billy!”

A short, well-groomed, fattish man came down the stairs three steps at a time and caught hold of Rudd's shoulders.

“My dear, good chap, how are you? I'm simply delighted to see you! How are you?”

To his immense surprise, he saw the thin, tall man, with the pale face, smile queerly, and then cover it with both his hands. Before Shefford could catch hold of his arms, the well-remembered figure tottered and fell in a heap at his feet.

“I should say, my lord, that the gentleman has been going without his food.”

Shefford threw a quick look at the figure he had just carried into the smoking room, and took the glass of brandy from the imperturbable butler.

“Without his food? Why?”

Billy opened his eyes. The brandy was held to his lips. He drank it eagerly.

“Oh, Podge,” he said feebly, though with his own particular smile, “I think I must have fallen a thousand miles. I think I must have fallen from the Land of Horrors to—to”—he glanced around the comfortable room—“to the Land of Heart's Desire.”

“Feeling better, dear old chap?” asked Shefford anxiously.

Billy gave the glass to the butler and sat up on the settee. The butler left the room with the air of an elderly sunbeam.

The two old friends looked at each other closely, and instinctively grasped hands.

“Did I faint? Fancy that! I never did such a thing before in my life. Podge, I should know you anywhere. You haven't altered a day.”

“You have, Billy.”

“Have I? To look at? I have altered inside. I am like a stagnant pool that has been poked up with a pole. By the Lord Harry, but it's good to see a civilized being again—a man who hasn't come a cropper, and isn't crawlin' about on his hands and knees! They were all doin' that, poor devils, at my hotel.”

“Abroad, do you mean?”

“No, and yes. Rowton's House, Blackfriars Bridge Road.”

Shefford gave a kind of gasp. “Good heavens! What have you been doing there?”

“It's a better place than I deserve to be in,” said Rudd, “by a long way. My story is easily told, Podge: I took a cottage on the river ten and a half years ago. I was goin' to write an epoch-making book—a work, as publishers say, in four volumes. Very fine and big and dry. I didn't write a line. I lay on my back in the sun and gambled all my money away.”

“Gambled! You!”

“I was a horsy man on foot,” said Rudd. “I backed my fancy. It's wonderful what a lot of men fancy has dragged into the gutter. Geordie found me without a red cent in the world and”

“George Temple, do you mean?”

“You remember Geordie?”

“Oh, rather!”

“And he towed me out of my dry dock into “the—sea. I was appointed secretary to dear old Sir Robert, and was petted and spoiled by them all. In fact, I was far too happy. It couldn't have lasted, in any case. I wanted a shock to show me the practical side of life. I got it, Podge.”

“Tell me,” said Shefford.

“I hadn't got out of my old habits of slackin' and puttin' money on horses, and I had a dream—how childish and petty it all sounds now!—about a horse entered for the Gold Cup. I brought down a five-pound note to put on it, and caught up one for fifty that didn't belong to me—I don't think I need add by mistake.”

“No, indeed!”

“Thanks, old man. I left the house like a thief, to earn the money to pay back Sir Robert, and I've been trampin' Fleet Street and sittin' on editorial doorsteps ever since. I think Fleet Street must have a harder pavement than any other street in London.”

Shefford laughed but his thoughts went back suddenly to Oxford and the coming man of his day.

“Wouldn't the beggars see you, Billy?”

Rudd shook his head sadly.

“I'll write to an editor I know, who may be in a position to put work in your way.” And Shefford went to a desk and wrote.

“I'm telling him,” he said over his shoulder, “what you did at Oxford, and that you are a great personal friend of mine, who wishes to meet him. But don't take anything he offers you unless it's good. We can do far better for you than that.”

“It's very kind of you, Podgy; very kind.”

Shefford blotted the letter and stood by the fireplace. He glanced at Billy uneasily once or twice, fidgeted with his watch chain, and then deliberately turned his back.

“By the way, Billy, you must let me advance you some money.”

Rudd rose. “Oh, no, thanks! Oh, decidedly no! I've got three shillings to go on with. I can live for two days at my hotel on that, like a cock—not a fighting cock, but an ordinary cock.”

Shefford saw it was no use arguing with Rudd. Like all diplomatists, he determined to gain his point by going off at a tangent.

“Very well. Look here. I'm more than busy, and until you settle down into regular work, I should take it as an immense kindness if you would fetch your things and put up here and give me a hand. Will you?”

Rudd made no answer for a moment. Then he went over to Shefford and put his hand on his shoulder.

“This is like you, Podge, just like you. But I have no right to luxuries yet, for a considerable time. Rowton's House is more in my line.”

Shefford caught hold of Billy and shook him. “You independent old beggar, you!” he cried. “Why won't you come? There's room enough here for two, and you really could help me, if you would. Now, will you?”

“If there's anything I can do, I will eagerly do it. But give me plenty, Podge. For God's sake, give me plenty! Don't let me sit about in comfortable chairs, doin' nothing. I couldn't bear it. Those forty-five sovereigns are like forty-five fifty-pound weights hangin' round my neck. You understand?”

Shefford gave him his hand. “I understand,” he said. “I shall expect you in an hour, with your things.”

“With all my luggage,” said Billy, with a laugh.

Some weeks later, Lord Shefford drove through the park, along Piccadilly into the Strand, and up Fleet Street.

It was the middle of August, when London is amusingly spoken of as being empty. The sun beat down upon crowded streets. Certainly the people passing were not Londoners, for the country had, as usual, set to partners with the metropolis, and America had sent over rather a larger contingent than usual of its queerly dressed people.

It amused Shefford extremely to watch them hurrying, with leaden faces, from place to place of public interest, guidebook in hand, unbecoming green veils floating behind the women's heads, cursorily doing the town. He was mildly interested to notice that all the men and all the women were dressed alike—the men in black or gray dump felt hats, short, tight jackets, baggy, pegtop trousers, and long, narrow boots that turned up at the toe—the women in ugly-patterned blouses, short, thick skirts, very tight over the hip, and determined-looking boots. They seemed to speak to one another seldom, and to preserve a look of studiously cultivated boredom.

The weather had been hot for several weeks, and it was pleasant to see very few men in that most hideous and meaningless of all hats—the tall one. Straw hats gleamed everywhere, and panamas made spots of moving white against the sooty buildings as they skimmed by on the tops of busses.

Shefford stopped his cab at a building on the left-hand side of the street, just before it reached Ludgate Hill, jumped out, and ran up three flights of leaden stairs. He stopped, with a paternal air, at a door on which was painted: “The Thursday Review of Social Matters, Parliament, and Literature.” A boy was busily employed in trying to balance a ruler on the tip of his nose as Shefford entered. It fell upon his forehead with a resounding crack.

“Take my card in to the editor,” said Shefford. “And if you feel compelled to balance things, why not do it to your accounts?”

The boy was in and out of the editor's room like a streak of lightning. He held the door open silently.

Shefford entered.

In his shirt sleeves, with his hair all wild, with ink on his face and fingers, sitting, with a smile of beaming happiness, amid books, newspapers, envelopes, and manuscripts, was Billy Rudd, worker.

He rose, a pen in his mouth, and silently, so far as mere words went, gave Shefford both hands, ink and all.

“Hello, Billy! Hard at it?”

Rudd dropped the pen out of his mouth onto his toe, and kicked it expertly onto his desk.

“I put the paper to bed to-morrow,” he answered, speaking affectionately, as a proud father speaks of an only child. “It's goin' to be a corkin' number!”

“They ve all been corkin' numbers since you sat in the editorial chair, Billy.”

Rudd laughed gleefully. “Think so? Really? No humbug? I've done my best, dear boy. I've done my best.”

“I hear from the business manager that the circulation has steadily improved.”

“Oh, has it? That's his department, you know. He looks after the circulation; I build up the constitution.”

Billy's laughter was contagious. Shefford sat down on a pile of books, and—he couldn't have told you why—went into gusts of it.

“Billy,” he said, “I believe you like this job.”

“Like it? My dear, good chap, 'like' is the feeblest, the most weak-kneed word in Johnson's dictionary with which to describe my feelings. I love it. I've never been so riotously happy, so dangerously happy, in all my life. I come here first thing in the mornin', long before the boy puts in an unwilling appearance, and leave only because I'm afraid that people would laugh at me if I slept here. I believe I'm capable of recitin' every word in the paper after I've tucked it up for the printers. Podge, old friend, it won't be through any slackin' of mine if this paper isn't made something far more substantial than a mere hobby on your part.”

Shefford was not an easily moved man. He had mixed too long in politics, too much with men and women of the world, to place much reliance on the sincerity of gratitude. He had had it often enough brought home to him that the more you do for people, the more you may do, and that every man works for himself and for no one else, and every woman, too. The almost eager gratitude of Rudd, the sight of this simple, guileless, whimsical man working with every atom of brain and nerve that he possessed, with the one ambition of turning this paper from a very costly hobby into a financial success brought a chokiness to Shefford's throat.

“If it goes on like this,” he said, “it will very soon round the corner. Your hand has electrified it, Billy. One traces it in the shrewd notes, in the whimsical theories, in the verse—everywhere. I believe you write the whole thing yourself.”

“Oh, no, I don't,” said Billy gravely. “Oh, dear, no! I hung about editorial stairs myself not so very long ago, and I try to give work to as many poor, capable beggars as I can. What do you think of that series of articles on 'The Poor Man's God'?”

“Oh, very fine! They have been much talked about.”

Billy rubbed his hands, with a chuckle. “They were written by a man I had noticed in Rowton House. He was an Oxford man, who schoolmastered till it drove him to drink. I got him to do them for me. Seein' himself in print again acted as a moral fillip to his constitution in the most extraordinary way. We're both new men. I've got an article of his here on the 'Reconstruction of Parliament' that will make Big Ben's tongue tremble. Oh, but have you anything to suggest? Did you come down here to blow me up about anything?”

“No,” said Shefford. “I was passing through, and I just wanted to see you at work. Come and lunch with me at Boodle's.”

“I should love to, but I daren't leave just now. The devil gets into the commas if I don't go over the proofs.”

“Well, then, good-by!”

“Good-by, dear old boy! A hundred thousand thanks for everything! I—I don't need to pull down the blind now, Podge. Oh, but you don't know anything about that, do you?”

He stood at the door and watched Shefford turn the corner of the staircase, but before the visitor's steps had died away, he was back at his desk, pen in hand, pipe in mouth, up to his eyes in work.

The blind no longer mattered, and the sun streamed in upon his head.

Under God's heaven that day there was one completely happy man, at any rate. I think that constituted a record, my friends.

For ten weeks the Temples saw nothing of Billy Rudd. He had come into their lives with his dog like a gleam of sunlight, and his disappearance left a sense of darkness in the house.

At first, George, knowing his impecunious state, had been distracted. He had rushed off to Ardpatrick and found Mrs. Linby living there, rent free, as caretaker, but no sign of Billy. He had made her promise to send a telegram immediately if Rudd should return, but no telegram had come. George had then inserted advertisements in the papers, had written to mutual friends—forgetting Shefford—but had hesitated to put the affair in the hands of the police.

A fortnight had gone by. Sir Robert and Lady Temple, George, Minch, the other servants, and Sybil had dreaded each day to look at the papers, for fear they should see there that the body of a man had been found in the river.

Sir Robert had reluctantly engaged a new secretary, a capable, erudite person, prim, proper, and precise, and had been obliged to set aside another room for him to work in. He sometimes felt, when he looked across his own room at the man's sleek head and correct attitude, that he would have given much to find him with his feet on the desk and his hands under his head, the sun resting on his placid face.

Lady Temple had tea served on the table in the study every afternoon, as she had done when Billy was there, and insisted on keeping his bed turned down so as to be ready for him at any moment should he return.

Minch had had no heart to back any other horses, and had spent much of his time with his nose glued to the windows of the drawing-room, eagerly watching the street.

As for Sybil and Jack, they had scoured London together, at all times of day, filled with hope at one moment, depressed past all words the next. That fortnight had been a black one in both their lives, and if Sybil wept bitter tears only at night, Jack didn't care who knew that he wept all day.

At the end of the fortnight, Sir Robert had received a short letter from Billy, giving no address, inclosing his second installment of five pounds. “I will bring the last five pounds,” he had written, “and ask you to see me.” And so they all waited, impatient, wondering, but more peaceful.

The weeks crept slowly along. Without any discussion, Sir Robert and Lady Temple silently decided to remain in London till Billy came.

As a matter of fact, Billy came every night. He never went home to his little flat in Clement's Inn without passing the house and raising his hat. Often he hid in a doorway because he saw George driving up in a cab, and ran forward before the door closed, and threw a kind of blessing into the hall.

A letter to Sir Robert arrived by the first post on each Saturday morning. On the tenth Saturday, the whole house assumed a tense air of expectancy. Sir Robert and Lady Temple, George, and Sybil were down half an hour too soon for breakfast. The post came and brought no letter.

“I think we will all wait in our own rooms,” said Sir Robert “He might not like to find us all at once.”

And so he made a move to the study, and gave Minch orders to show Mr. Rudd up there immediately on his arrival. George paced up and down in the next room. Lady Temple, in her writing room, read the paper upside down and sat listening for the bell. Sybil sat on the floor of her bedroom, nursing Jack, hardly able to bear the suspense. Minch stood behind the door, with his hand on the handle.

At last the bell rang. Unable to speak, the butler flung open the door. Rudd grasped his hand and wrung it violently, in silence. Then he passed in and went slowly upstairs and tapped at the study door. Sir Robert made a sound, and Rudd went in.

Half an hour later, Sir Robert rang his bell and sent Minch for Lady Temple, and ten minutes later George was called in. Last of all came Sybil with Jack, and I don't think I ought to tell you what happened then. There are moments in the lives of a dog and his master that are too sacred to be described.

“You haven't brought your luggage, I hear, Mr. Rudd,” said Lady Temple reproachfully.

“No, no,” replied Billy. “It's very kind of you—although the word 'kind,' in speakin' of the inmates of this house, is a flabby and anæmic one—but, you see, I daren't leave my baby for a very long time.”

“Baby? What do you mean?”

Billy threw back his head, and in his laughter there was a mixture of pride and humility. He put his hand into his pocket, drew forth the latest number of the paper, and handed it to Lady Temple.

“This is my baby,” he said.

“The Thursday Review!” she exclaimed.

“The Thursday!” echoed Sir Robert.

“The Thursday!” cried George

Billy looked from one to the other with eyes alight with pleasure. “Do you know it? Have you ever seen it?”

“I have read it every week since it appeared,” said Sir Robert, “and never with more pleasure than recently.”

“Do you write for it, Billy?” asked George.

Billy chuckled. “I edit it, dear boy,” he replied.

“By Jove!” said George. “What an ass I am! I ought to have known that there is only one man living who can write about birds as you can. And I was on the point of applying to Scotland Yard to find you.”

“You will lunch with us, at least?” said Lady Temple, when she was able to get a word in edgeways.

“Thanks!” said Billy.

“And until the witching hour approaches, it would be kind of you to take Sybil and Jack out for a walk. They both look as if a good airing would do them good.”

And so, shortly after, Rudd and Sybil found themselves alone in Kensington Gardens, with Jack, in a state of delirious joy, alternately at their heels and far ahead of them.

It was one of those rare days when even London has its points of beauty. The flower beds were masses of color. In the warm air a hundred different scents clashed harmoniously. The old elms, weighed down with leaves, cast their dignified shadows upon the grass, and a film of haze softened the hard lines of the houses and lent a sense of distance that made it possible for even a confirmed town hater like Rudd to breathe freely.

For a long time they walked in a contented silence. To them there was only one interpretation to the songs of the birds—“God's in His heaven, all's right with the world.”

Sybil stood under one of the trees and picked up a stick and flung it ahead for Jack. He bounded after it with so absurdly puppyish a bark that Sybil laughed.

“Jack's three years younger since yesterday,” she said. “He missed you.”

“It's good to be missed.”

“I believe he has grown white hairs he never had before, and I'm certain there are lines under his eyes.”

“I haven't thanked you for looking after him,” said Rudd.

“I did my best to console him,” she replied.

There was something in her voice that made Rudd's heart jump and tremble. “As a respectable member of society,” he thought quickly, “with a good income, dare I”

He looked at the girl at his side. He noted, with a kind of regret, her lissome freshness, her air of refinement, her never-so-apparent aloofness from anything sordid. And he felt that he was answered. Not for a single instant did he imagine that she had spent sleepless nights, crying out his name and beseeching him to come back. Not for the fraction of a second did he try to persuade himself that there was one thought in her mind that was tinged with anything beyond friendship. He did think that he might consider himself her friend, and for that he was vastly thankful.

“How is it that you are in London at this time of year?” he asked.

Sybil picked up the stick Jack had put down at her feet, and threw it. “Oh,” she said, “George's work kept him here, and so—we all stayed.”

“You are going away, I suppose?”

“I suppose so.”

“Far?”

“Not very far. Father took a house at Pangbourne for the summer. I think we shall go there.”

“You will remember the promise I wrung from you before you go?”

“Did you wring a promise from me?”

“A full-face photograph, if you remember, to put on my desk.”

“You have your baby,” she said. “I don't think you will need it now.”

“Need it?” he echoed, with a tremble in his voice he forced himself to control. “You don't really think that?”

“I do,” she replied; “unless you wish to have it as a warning to you not to overwork. I can see perfectly plainly that you do. It's in your eyes, and in the new gray hairs on your temples. Only on condition that you stop when you think I should like you to, will I give you one.”

“I'm ready to live up to any condition, to have it on my desk.”

“It's yours,” she said.

Involuntarily they both turned, and not another word was spoken. But, with the unerring instinct of a woman in these matters, Sybil had read Billy's thoughts. The jealousy she could not help feeling toward his baby died out of her heart, and in its place slipped a great content.

Several days later, the Temples left London for Pangbourne. Only George remained behind. His work as parliamentary secretary to a cabinet minister prevented him from holiday making.

During the last fortnight of August and the first fortnight of September Billy saw a good deal of his friend. Regularly every evening about ten a resounding whack shook Billy's oak; and long after the church clock in Clement's Inn had struck midnight these two would be sitting at the open window, settling all that was wrong with the world, much as they had used to do at similarly late hours in Billy's rooms in the High, not so many years ago as to have robbed them of the enthusiasm and the sweeping optimism of youth.

“Geordie,” Rudd said eagerly, after one of these discussions, “come here and stay with me. It would delight me beyond words to play father and mother and sister to you. Now, do! Only think of the pleasure it will give me to entertain the man who gave me a roof when it looked extremely as if I should have none! Will you, Geordie?”

“Thanks, Billy. I should like nothing better.”

And from that day onward George found himself looked after as no mother or sister or valet had ever looked after him, thoughtful and solicitous as they were. His bath was turned on for him in the morning, his clothes folded and put away, his boots put on their jacks, his slippers placed ready for him at night. He frequently woke to find Billy, with tousled head, creeping on tiptoe about the room, putting the studs and links in his shirt or stropping his razors.

“Drop it, Billy!” he would shout. “I didn't come here to be valeted by you. I'm dashed if I'll put up with it!”

“Shut up, and go to sleep! It's a free country, and if I like to do these things for my guest, I suppose I can.”

On the last day of September, Billy Rudd found among his letters one addressed to “Mr. W. M. O. Rud, Esquire.” It ran as follows:

“Jack, you old scamp, would you like to go back to the Land of Nod for a day and get a rat or two?”

Jack rose, stretched each leg separately with lazy care, yawned, shook himself, and wagged his tail.

“Right! We'll go together. I've been longin' for a decent excuse. It's the finest day that ever was born.”

In the highest spirits, these two left London, and as each station fell behind them and houses with patches of yard and clotheslines and cheering infants became scarcer and gradually gave place to open country, Billy threw his hat into the rack, flung open his coat, stuck his feet up on the opposite seat, and lay back, with his eyes shut, and let the sun play once more on his face.

It was not quite the same face as the one George had looked down upon three months before. It was paler and thinner, but more eager, more alert.

Jack's exuberance on finding himself at his own station among his own friends once again was almost absurd. He rushed from porter to porter, he bounded into the luggage office and sent a bicycle sprawling, and finally, as Billy entered the lane, made one great rush and disappeared over the hill.

Billy followed as quickly as he could, noting with a kind of eagerness all the familiar landmarks and with affection the wild flowers in the hedges, the birds that fluttered in front of him, and the deepening colors on the leaves on the trees.

The old man with the wooden leg looked up as Billy drew near, and a smile of welcome broke out around his mouth.

“Good mornin', Amos,” sang out Rudd.

“Marnin', Mister Rudd. Glad to see 'ee back.”

Rudd nodded his thanks, and swung swiftly on, past the “Blue Cow,” through the village, waving his hand right and left over the green, and down the lane to the cottage.

Mrs. Linby, with Jack leaping up at her, stood at the gate, flushed and tearful with pleasure.

“Ah, ha, Mrs. Linby! Here we are, you see. We read your letter with our early tea, and couldn't resist it. Hello! What's become of the string on the gate? By the Lord Harry, somebody's mended the lock! And, I say, who's patched and painted the portico?”

Mrs, Linby's whole bundle of figure quivered with excitement.

“Batton, my sister's husband, who owed me a bit of money, did it all after 'is work, sir. I wanted the place to look nice against your come back.”

“Nice!” said Billy. “Why, my dear Mrs. Linby, it's swagger—positively swagger! And by all that's neat and proper, if you haven't had the grass cut and beds raked up and planted flowers! I never saw anything like it in my life. Jack, keep on the path, you scoundrel!”

Following Mrs. Linby, who laughed at one moment and cried at another, Billy made a tour of inspection of the house. He found everything clean and polished. Not a scrap of dust was to be seen anywhere. The whole place was as spotless as a Normandy farm-house.

He picked up an old pipe, loaded it, flung his hat into a chair, turned to the beaming woman, and took both her hands.

“Mrs. Linby,” he said, “never before in its life has the cottage gleamed like this. You're a very marvelous old body, and I thank you, I thank you cordially.”

“Don't say too much, sir, or I shall fling my apron over my 'ead and cry as if my 'eart was breakin'.”

“Mrs. Linby, I'll not say another word, not another syllable.”

“Thank you, sir. You see, sir, I kep' on sayin' to myseff as I worked, 'You must get the 'ouse to rights, Mrs. L., for maybe as 'ow the master'll bring back a wife.'”

“Oh, you did, did you? Jack, will you keep to the path? Can't you see, you villain, that this is no longer the resort of lazy, good-for-nothing loafers?”

He went into the garden and walked down to the spot where he had spent so many hours lying on his back. And he looked out at the river sliding quietly along.

“And so she thought the master might bring back a wife, did she? I would to God he had, Mrs. Linby, my dear, with all my heart and soul!”

He sat down on an old log and, with his chin of his hands, gave himself up for the first time to a feeling of intense loneliness. Before him, more distinct than ever, he could see the beautiful face and slim figure of Sybil, surrounded by young people, while he himself grew gray and round-shouldered alone. It was not a picture he resented. It was right that she should have life and youth always at her side—right that he should remain in the backwaters, as he had always done.

A punt, gliding quietly along, stopped suddenly, then turned directly into the bank on which Rudd was sitting. The girl in the punt saw that Rudd's eyes were looking at something a hundred miles away, and so, standing in the boat, with a smile on her lips, she waited.

She saw Billy sit up with a jerk and rub his eyes. She saw him spring to his feet and hold out his hands. Without a word, she gave him the chain of the punt, waited until he had slipped it over a branch, took his hand, and stood beside him.

“Well?” she asked. “Have you nothing to say to me?”

Billy looked into her eyes, and a great trembling seized him. He made a kind of helpless gesture, tried to speak, but wasn't able to trust himself.

“Let me say it for us both.” She gave him her hand. “You love me?”

“Yes,” he said.

“You will marry me?”

“Yes,” he said.

Whereupon the birds sang louder and the leaves applauded and the breeze ran away with the news.

And this is the end, so far as we are concerned, of the story of Billy Rudd. For Billy Rudd it was the beginning of another story.

title: Nature's Vagabond