'Now,' panted Armstrong, 'shall I have the truth?'

There was no answer, and he fell to again; but Paul turned and caught his arm, and after an ineffectual struggle, the old man dropped the tawse and walked into the kitchen. Paul dressed and sat on the table, quivering all over. He sat there for hours, and nobody approached him until at last the servant, with frightened eyes, came to make ready for dinner; then he got up and went to his old refuge in the lumber-room. One of his sisters brought him food after the family dinner-hour, but he refused it passionately.

'Oh, Paul,' she said, clinging to him till he shook her from his writhing shoulders, 'why don't you confess?'

'Confess what? snarled Paul. 'Confess I was born into a family of fools and nincompoops? That's all I've got to confess.'

He was left to himself all day, and at night he went un-chidden to the larder, and helped himself to bread and cheese. He took a jug to the pump, and coming back, ate his meal, standing amongst his people like an outlaw.

'Well, Paul,' said his father, 'are ye in the mind to make a clean breast of it?'

'No,' said Paul, 'I'm not.'

The defiance fell like a thunderbolt, and eyes changed with eyes all round the room in horror and amazement.

'We'll see in the morning,' Armstrong said.

'All right,' answered Paul; and so finished his meal, and took his cap from its hook behind the door.

'Where are you going?' cried his mother.

'That's my business,' said Paul, breaking into sudden passionate defiance. 'What am I flogged like a dog for? You don't know. There isn't one of you, from father down to George, who knows what I've been doing. I can't remember an hour's fair play from the day that I was born. Look here, father: you may take another turn at me to-morrow and next day, you can come on every morning till I'm as old as you are, but you'll never get a word out of me. I've done no harm, and anybody with an ounce of justice in him would prove something before he served his own flesh and blood as you've served me.'

He was in a rage of tears again, and every word he spoke was tuned to the vulgar accent of his childhood. 'Father' was 'feyther' and 'born' was 'boorn.' He did not speak like a poet, or look like one to whose full soul all things yielded pleasure. These thoughts hit Paul, and he laughed loud and bitterly, and went his way into the street.

The upshot of it was that Paul was flogged no more. Armstrong sickened of the enterprise, and gave it up.

The lonely man was thinking of it all, seeing it all. Suddenly a voice seemed to speak to him, and the impression was so astonishingly vivid that before he knew he had answered it aloud. He started awake at the sound of his own voice, and his skin crisped from head to heel.

'There's no rancour, Paul, lad?' the voice had said, or seemed to say.

'Rancour?' he had answered, with a queer tender laugh. 'You dear old dad!'

For the first time the sense of an actual visitation rested with him, and continued real. He felt, he knew, or seemed to know, that his father's soul was near.



CHAPTER III

Paul was standing in a room in the old house in Church Vale, the room in which the fiddles hung around the wall in their bags of green baize. A sound of laughter drew him to the kitchen, and he had to make his way through a darkened narrow passage, with the up-and-down steps of which he was not familiar. At the turn of the passage he came upon a picture.

To the man at the tent door it was as clear as if the bodily eye yet rested upon it.

The kitchen floor was of cherry-red square bricks; the door was open to the June sunlight, framing its scrap of landscape, with the windlass of the well and the bucket overgrown with mosses and brimming with water crystal clear, and there were flowering plants in the window, with leaves and blossoms all translucent against the outer dazzle. The whole family was gathered there: Uncle Dan, with his six feet of yeoman manhood, bald and rufous-gray; Aunt Deborah, with her child's figure and the kind old face framed in the ringlets of her younger days; the girls and the boys, a houseful of them, ranging in years from six-and-twenty to four or five, and every face was puckered with laughter, and every hand and voice applauded. In their midst was a stranger to Paul, a girl of eighteen, who marched up and down the room with a half-flowered foxglove in her hand. She carried it like a sabre at the slope, and her step was a burlesque of the cavalry stride. She issued military orders to an imaginary contingent of troops, and her contralto voice rang like a bell. Her upper lip was corked in two dainty black lines of moustache, and on her tumbled and untidy curls she had perched a shallow chip strawberry-pottle, which sat like a forage-cap.

'Carry—so! she sang out; and at that instant, discerning a stranger, she turned, with bent shoulders and a swift rustle of skirts, and skimmed into the back garden.

'Oh, you silly!' cried one of the girls; 'it's only Paul.'

She came back, and as she passed the old moss-grown bucket she bent to it and scooped up a palmiul of water, and washed away the moustache of burnt cork; then, with a coquettish lingering in her walk, she came in, patting her lips with her apron, her roguish head still decorated with the strawberry-pottle. Her eyes sparkled with an innocent baby devilry, but the rest of her face was as demure as a Quakeress's bonnet Her hair was of an extraordinary fineness and plenty, and as wayward as it was fine, so that with the shadow of the doorway round her, and the bright sunlight in every thread of it, it burned like a halo.

'Paul?' she said, pausing in front of him, and looking from a level right into his eyes, whilst her rosy little hands smoothed her apron. 'Is Paul a cousin, too?'

'Of course he is,' said the girl who had called her back; 'he's our first cousin, Paul is.'

'Is he,' she asked, with demure face and dancing eye—' is he—in a kissing relationship?'

'Try him, my wench,' said Paul's uncle.

She bunched her red lips for a kiss, like a child, and advanced her head. Paul's face was like a peony for colour, but he pouted his lips also, and bent to meet hers. When they had almost met, she drew her head back with a demure shake and a look of doubt The kitchen rang with laughter at Paul's hangdog discomfiture. The innocent, wicked, tantalizing eye mocked him, and he was awhirl with shame; but he found in the midst of it a desperate courage, and, throwing one arm around her neck, he kissed her full on the lips with a loud rustic smack.

'Well,' she said, with a face of horrified rebuke, all but the eyes, which fairly danced with mirth and mischief, 'if that's Castle Barfield manners, I'd better go home again.'

'Quite right, Paul,' said Paul's uncle. 'Stand none o' their nonsense, lad.'

'Oh, but, uncle,' said she, 'you would think him milder to look at him—now, wouldn't ee?'

Paul knew the speech of the local gentry, he knew his father's Ayrshire accent, and his own yokel drawl; but this new cousin spoke an English altogether strange to his ears, and it sounded fairylike. He stared in foolish worship.

'You'd better know who you be,' said Paul's uncle, 'and shake hands. This is your grand-uncle's grand-niece, Paul. May Gold her name is. May, my darlin', this is Paul Armstrong.'

She held out her hand, and Paul took it shyly in his own. He had very rarely touched a hand which was not roughened more or less by labour. The warm, soft pressure tightened on his own hard palm for an instant only, but he tingled from head to foot as if he had touched something electric.

'Oh!'-she said, 'this is Uncle Armstrong's little boy? She was by two years his senior, and for a girl she was tall; but he was more than on a level with her so far as mere height went, and the phrase cut him at the heart. She took the strawberry-pottle from her head with both hands, as if it had been a crown, and laid it on the kitchen dresser. 'I've heard my father talk of his father five hundred times. My father thinks no end of Uncle Armstrong. He says that for a man of learning he never met anybody one half so sensible.'

Paul fell head over heels in love with the pretty cousin from Devonshire. That is to say, he fell in love with his own dreams about her, and they were sweet enough for any lad to fall in love with. She sang and she played, she brimmed over with accomplishment, which was all rustic enough, no doubt, but angel-fine to Paul, and exotic, and not like anything within his knowledge. She played and she sang that afternoon, and never again had Paul's ears drunk in such tones of heaven.

He went home in an ecstasy of delight and anguish. How beautiful she was! what a grace enveloped her! Her very name was a ravishment—a name of spring and flowers and pure bright skies. May! He dared to whisper it, and he tingled from head to heel. His heart fondled it: May! May! May! and, with inexpressible vague, sweet longing, May! once more. Then her hair! then her voice! then the rosy softness of her hand! then, with hideous revulsion, from her perfections to himself! The gulf of shame! His boots were an epic of despair, his necktie was a tragedy. Then back to her with all the graces of the heavens upon her! Then back to himself again, and the deep damnation of the button which was missing from his waistcoat Paul was a poet, and should have had a soul above buttons; but before the phantom of that missing button his soul grovelled, until it sprang up once more to hover round her foot, her hand, her eyes, her voice, her name of May! May! May! and, with shudders of frostiest self-reproach and richest pleasure, round the memory of that kiss!

In a week or two Paul had grown devoutly religious, and had no idea of the real why. The Church Vale cousins were ardent churchgoers, for the girls were at the time of life for ardour, and both the Vicar and his Curate were unmarried. Paul, whose proper place of Sabbath boredom was Ebenezer, was welcome as a proselyte, and had a seat in the family pew, and the rapture of walking homeward sometimes by the side of the feminine magnet.

So the dweller at the tent door sees himself at church, a pious varier from chapel. The July sunbeams are falling through stained glass; the roof-beams of the nondescript old building are half visible in shadow. The windows are open, and a warm, spiced wind flutters through in pleasantly successful disputation with odours of dry-rot and chilly earth and stone. The sheep are bleating amongst the mounded graves, and the curate is bleating at the lectern. A yearning peace is in Paul's heart, and the pretty distant cousin is near at hand, with a smell of dry lavender in her dress. The first twining of feeling and belief is here, the earliest of many of those juggleries of Nature which make a fool of reason. Oh, sweet hour! oh, happy world! oh, holy place, where she is! Oh, harmless, innocent calf-love! A jolly old throstle is singing away in the elm which overhangs the parson's gate. There is a disembodied skylark voice somewhere high up in the mare's-tail clouds which veil the earth from too much heat and brightness; and the young heart is unhardened and unspotted from the world.

And oh! oho! the elysium of the summer mornings, when Dick and Paul, and the cousins, male and female, rose at four and strayed with their Devonian angel through lanes and fields as far as Beacon Hargate, gathering wild flowers and calling at the farm for milk. There are no more such flowers, there is no more such air, no more such merry sunshine; there is no such nectar any more as foamed in the shining pail.

On the way from Church Vale to Beacon Hargate there is a brook, which now runs ink and smells of evil, and in those days flowed so clear that you could count the parcel-coloured pebbles at the bottom, through water which was sometimes pellucid as diamond, and sometimes of a cairngorm colour. The arched pathway over it, with its weather-stained, square-cut timber guards at either side, was called June Bridge, and above and below the bridge, in curved hollows of the banks where the bed of the brook was earthy, water-lilies floated, sliding with the stream, and tugging back on their oozy anchorage. Paul found his goddess leaning on this bridge, watching the lilies, and began to hum whilst he was yet out of hearing,

'May, on June bridge, in July weather,' and to make a song in his head.

'Can ee swim, Paul?' asked his goddess.

'Oh yes,' said Paul, 'I can swim right enough. Want them lilies?' She nodded, smiling. 'I'll get 'em for you.'

He climbed the bridge, and dropped into the meadow.

'I'll wait for ee,' said May, and sauntered on out of sight.

Paul stripped and dived, came up with a shake of the head, and swam down-stream. He reached the water-lilies in a dozen strokes, laid a hand on the stalk of one in passing, and tugged at it. The stem proved to be tougher than he had guessed, and he dropped his feet to find bottom. He was out of his depth, but he set both hands low and twisted at the stem. This took him under water, but he came up smiling triumph, threw his prize into the meadow, and paddled round the group on an outlook for the finest blooms. One in the very middle of the floating bed was fresh and flawless, and he swam for it. A number of cold weedy things were round his legs at once, and before he knew it he was thickly meshed. The slimy touch sent an unpleasant thrill through him, but he had no sense of fear as yet He wrenched off the bloom he had aimed for, and again he went under water. Then he found he could not rise, and a sudden spasm of terror shook him. He struggled madly, and the pulses in his head beat like bells. Just when the case seemed desperate, and he felt as if he must take breath or die, something gave way. He surged upward, and got one great gulp of air. His senses came back to him, and the terror died away. He threw himself upon his back and paddled, and, keeping his face above water thus, he tried artrully and slowly to extricate his legs from the net which held them. A minute went by, and he was bound as fast as ever. Instinct told him that another struggle meant ruin, and yet instinct bade him struggle. He set his teeth and paddled softly. How long could he last like this? he asked himself; and at that instant he seemed to find an answer. The attitude in which he floated was becoming rapidly more and more upright. There was a sinking weight upon his feet.

At this he shrieked for help, but he paddled softly and without hurry all the same. He listened as well as he could for the beating in his ears. The fields seemed deserted, but he called again. He closed his eyes and listened, paddling softly, with set teeth. He was nearly upright in the water now, and the weight still dragged But there was yet an inch or two to spare, and he was resolved to make the most of his chances. He called for help again, and a voice answered him petulantly from the bank.

'You silly toad!' said the pretty cousin. 'What do you want to frighten me like that for?' 'I'm drowndin'!' Paul answered.

'Not you!' said the pretty cousin. She made a movement of disdain, and turned away; but Paul yelled at her with a fear so vivid that she turned again with a white face, and fell upon her knees. 'Oh, Paul,' she cried, 'are ee really drownin'?'

'Yes, I am,' said Paul doggedly. 'These blasted weeds is pullin' me down. Be quick! Tie that there lace thing to your parasawl, and shy it to me. Look slippy, or it'll be all up with me. Hold your end tight. Now, shy! Pull now! Gently—gently.'

He reached the bank, and gripped it with both hands. There was no need to say that he had had a fright. His wide eyes and the colour of his face said that.

'Can ee get out now?' she asked.

'No,' said Paul; 'I'm anchored.'

'I'll pull ee out,' said she, rising to her feet; and Paul thrust one hand towards her. She took him by the wrist, stuck both heels in the crisp turf, and pulled. Paul set an elbow on the brink, and strained upwards with all his might Something sucked out of the stream-bed, and the waters went muddy. 'You're coming!' cried May, and gave a haul which was meant to be victorious; but Paul still hung like a log.

'There's about a ton of it,' said Paul. 'It's tied like ropes.'

'Gimme t'other hand,' returned young Devon. 'I'll pull ee out if I dies for't.'

Paul surrendered the other hand, and she pulled. There was another suck at the bottom of the stream, and Paul came up by a foot. She went backwards for a new vantage-ground, and pulled again, and Paul came to bank, clothed from the waist downward in water-lily leaf and weed, and lay face downwards helpless on the turf at her feet.

'Now,' she said tartly, 'you're not goin' to faint, I hope!' Paul said nothing. 'Like a girl,' she added, with disdain.

'Not me,' answered Paul, with his nose in the turf. 'What have I got to feint for?'

He asked the question with feeble scorn, and fainted.

May Gold stooped to a basket which lay near her, and, taking from it a pair of garden scissors, knelt beside Paul, and began to snip his bonds. He woke to find her thus engaged, and a virginal sweet sense of shame filled him. Her fingers touched his skin at times, and he tingled with a soft fire.

'Nobody'd think it from they grimy paws,' said May Gold to herself; 'but he've got a skin as fair as a maid's.'

Paul heard the words, and shuddered exquisitely as she laid her soft warm hand on his shoulder, leaning over him, and slicing away at the withes in a business-like fashion.

'I'll finish that,' he said tremulously.

'La,' she cried, 'the child's awake all the time! There's the scissors; I'll go and wait in the lane.'

Paul lay still for a moment listening to the rustle of her dress; and when it had gone out of hearing he rolled over, and with a shaking hand began to free himself of the remnant of his bonds. He had not, so far, had time to think of the imminent peril from which he had escaped. He had been near death. Death! What a grip at the heartstrings! He had had his second of terror in the fact, but the fact was nothing like the looking back on it There was no urgent fear now to compel him to the restraint of cowardice, and at this instant he was coward from scalp to sole—from heart to skin coward. The peril escaped was a thousand times more horrible than the peril endured, and he quailed now that the danger was over.

All his thoughts and half his feelings had hurried for weeks past towards prayer. In his extremity he had not prayed or thought of praying. A cool, self-centred, self-preserving something in his mind had taught him to command all his own forces for one purpose. Would he have been damned if he had lost the power to pray before that cunning mentor of the flesh deserted him?

He dressed lingeringly and feebly, and when he had done so he went back to the tangle of water-weeds he had left on the river-bank. There were a dozen of the lovely waxlike blooms amongst them, uninjured. He snipped them away with the scissors, and, climbing the stile with heavy feet, surrendered them to May.

'Oh,' she said shrilly, 'take 'em away! I couldn't bear to look at 'em!'

'Take 'em,' said Paul. 'They jolly nigh cost me my life.'

Before he answered (or before she caught the meaning of his answer) she had flung them into the roadway; but at the instant when she understood him she made a dart at them, gathered them all together in her hands, and sped to the brookside. There she lay at length upon the turf, and washed the blooms in the flowing water. Then she gathered long tough grasses, and looped them together until she had made a cord, with which she bound the waxen posy. Paul followed and sat near, languidly propped on one hand to watch her.

'Paul Armstrong,' said May, and he knew at once by this manner of address that she was going to be severe with him, 'I'd no idea you was so wicked.'

'Oh,' Paul answered defensively, 'I ain't wicked—not over and above.'

'You're a very wicked boy indeed,' she said. 'You was in danger of your life—there's no mistake about that, though at first I didn't believe you.'

'There's nothing wicked in that,' said Paul

'Ah 1' she cried, her little white teeth gripping one end of the grassy cord whilst she wound the other about the stems of the water-lilies, 'I can see you know what I mean. Using bad language in the very face of death and danger! I wonder you wasn't drowned for a judgment.'

'Oh, come,' Paul answered. 'I didn't use bad language.'

'Oh, yes, you did, though,' she retorted. 'And I'm not going to be friends with a boy as talks like that.'

'Not friends!' said Paul. 'Why, May?' He spoke in an accent of incredulous reproach.

'No,' she said. 'I'm properly shocked, I tell ee. I'm never going to be friends again.'

'If I thought that was goin' to be true,' said Paul, 'do you know what I'd do?'

'No, I don't,' she answered, 'and I don't want to.'

'I'd hull myself into that brook this minute and never come out again.'

'You'd do what? she asked.

To 'hull' is to hurl in the dialect Paul spoke in youth. The word was strange to her.

'I'd throw myself into that brook this minute, and never come out again.'

'Oh, you wicked boy!' she cried, but her eyes sparkled with triumph. She quenched the sparkle. 'It is true; and after that piece of wickedness, it's truer than ever.'

Paul rose to his feet; his face was white, and his eyes stared as they had done when she had just rescued him.

'Good-bye, May,' he said.

'Good-bye,' she answered coolly.

'You're never goin' to be friends any more, May?'

'No,' she said, but rose to her feet with a shriek, for Paul had taken two swift paces, and had plunged back into the brook, clothes and all. 'Paul!' she shrilled after him. 'Paul! Don't ee drown. Don't ee now. Don't, don't, don't, don't, don't ee!'

Paul stood shoulder-deep in the stream, and she besought him from the bank with clasped hands and frightened eyes.

'Goin' to be friends,' said Paul grimly.

'Yes, yes, yes!' she cried. 'Come out, do, there's a dear!'

Paul reached the bank in a stroke, and climbed back into the meadow. The instant he gained his feet she rushed at him and boxed his ears furiously. Paul laughed with pleasure. He had had his head punched by every fighting peer within a mile of home, and the soft little hands fell like a sort of fairy snowflakes.

'Oh, you wicked, wicked, wicked boy!' she raged, stamping her foot at him. 'You can go in again as soon as ee want to. I won't be so fullish as to call ee out.'

'D'ye mean it?' asked Paul, suddenly grim again.

'No,' she said, fawning on him with her hands, but doing it at a distance for fear of his wet clothes. 'But, Paul, child, you'll catch your death. Run home.'

'I'm not a child,' said Paul. 'I'm within two years as old as you are, May. I say, May———'

'Oh, do run home!' she coaxed him. 'Do ee, now, Paul, for my sake.'

'I'm off,' said Paul. 'Ask me anything like that, and I'll walk into fire or water.'

'Why, Paul,' said the little Vanity, turning her face down, and looking up at him past her beautiful lashes and arched brows, 'whatever makes you talk like that?'

'Because it's the simple truth,' said Paul 'You try me, May.'

'But why is it the simple truth?' she asked.

'Because——' said Paul fiercely, and then stopped dead.

'Oh, that's no answer,' she said, with a little sway of her hips. She kept her eye upon him, but turned her head slightly aside. She might have practised glance and posture all her life and made them no more telling. But Paul's teeth were beginning to chatter, and she was alarmed. 'Don't stop to tell me now,' she said, and seeing that he was about to protest, she added swiftly: 'Come and tell me to-night, Paul, won't ee, now? And run home now, Paul, do, there's a dear. Run, and then you won't catch cold—to please me, Paul.'

So Paul ran, and ran himself into a glow, and felt as if the fire of comfort in his heart would have warmed the Polar regions. Until time and experience taught him better, he always wanted a big word for even the least of themes.

'Man,' said old Armstrong once (but that was years later), 'ye'd borrow the lungs of Gargantua to sing the epic of a house-fly.'

'Yes, dad,' said Paul; 'that's a capital imitation of my style,' and they both chuckled affectionately.

But now his mind was a mere firework of interjections—squibs, bombs, and rockets of 'Oh!' and 'Ah!' and 'Now!' and 'She'll listen! and 'She'll despise me!' He was within a month of sixteen, and he was in receipt of sixpence a week as pocket-money, but the second fact was to be no more durable than the first. He could neither stay at sixteen nor at the sixpence. Time would take care of the one event, and Paul of the other. An immediate marriage, perhaps even an early marriage, was out of question. It might be necessary to wait for years. There was a fortune to be made, of course, and though it might come by some rare chance to-morrow, it might, on the other hand, take time.

'We've got to be practical,' said Paul.

Whether Paul were a greater ass than most imaginative boys of his years may be a question, but he was as serious about this matter as if he had been eight-and-twenty, and when he reached home he had been rejected and had died of it, and accepted and married many times over. He got into his working clothes after a thorough rub down, and, except for a touch of languor, was none the worse for his morning's adventure. Armstrong was out on business for the day, and in the drowsy afternoon Paul laid an old press blanket on the office floor, took a ream of printing-paper for a pillow, and slept like a top. This made an end of languor, and when the hour of freedom struck, he ran down the weedy garden and raced upstairs to his attic-chamber, and there attired himself in his best. These were days when the cheapest of cheap dandies wore paper cuffs and collars, then newly discovered, and Paul made himself trim in this inexpensive fashion. He had spent half an hour at his ablutions before leaving the office, and walked towards his rendezvous all neat and shining.

May met him at the door with a finger on her lips and a pretty air of mystery.

'I've had to fib about ee. Uncle Dan saw you run past all wet this morning, and he asked. I had to tell him something. I said you fell in trying to reach them watter-lilies. I didn't want your own uncle to know your wickedness.'

There was not time for more, for Uncle Dan himself appeared at this moment.

'None the worse for your duckin', eh, Paul?'

'Not a bit.'

'We're goin' to have a bit of music, lad. Come in and sit down, if you've a mind to it.'

Paul half welcomed and half resented the putting off of the decisive moment He was in a dreadful nervous flutter, his hopes alternately flying like a flag in a high wind, and drooping in a sick abandonment of everything. And May was more ravishing than ever. She had stuck the stem of a rose in one little ear like a pen, and the full flower itself nestled drooping at her cheek. There was never anything in the world more demure than her face and her manner, but the frolic eye betrayed her mood now and then, and Paul was half beside himself at every furtive smile she shot at him. A local tenor, the pride of the church choir, was there, and May and he sang duets together, amongst them 'Come where my love lies dreaming.' Paul's heart obeyed the call with a virgin coyness, and his thoughts stole into some dim-seen shadowed sanctuary, some place of silence where the feet fell soft, and a pale curtain gleamed, and where behind the curtain lay something so sacred that he dared not draw the veil, even in fancy. 'Her beauty beaming,' sang the local tenor. 'Her beauty beaming,' May's voice carolled. Heaven, how it beamed! The boy's emotion choked him. If shame had not lent him self-control, he would have broken into tears before them all.

The musical hour wore away, and the local tenor had a supper engagement, and must go. May slid from the room, and soon after her voice was heard calling 'Paul.'

Paul answered.

'Come here a minute,' she said. 'I want to speak to ee.'

Paul stumbled out, blind and stupid. She was standing at the open door with some gauzy white stuff loosely folded over her hair and drawn over her bosom. The July moon was at the full, and low in the heavens.

'Look at that,' she said, and Paul looked.

The four poplars clove the intense dark blue, but not so loftily as in his first remembrance of them. The street was quiet Not a sound disturbed the humming spicy silence of the summer night Paul turned from that sweet intoxication to her face. She smiled at him, and his heart seemed to swoon. He did not know till later, but she suffered from some very slight tenderness of the eyes which made them shrink from too much light, and he had never seen her in her full beauty until this moment, when they seemed so large and deep that he could scarcely bear to look at them. She had a hat in her hand, and she held it out to him, still smiling, but so dreamily, so unlike herself, that he could but look and tremble and wonder. He took the hat mechanically, and saw that it was his own. He thought himself dismissed, and his heart changed from a soft ethereal fire to cold lead.

'Auntie!' she called—'Aunt Deb 'Me and Paul's goin' to take a bit of a walk. I've got to give him a lecture.'

Some affectionate assenting answer came, and May floated into the moonlight, across the street, and into a shady alley which lay between two high-hedged gardens; then into moonlight again, across another road, through a clinking turnstile, and into a broad field, where Paul had played many a game of cricket before and after working hours. From here the open country gleamed, mystic and strange; every hill and dale familiar, and all unlike themselves, as a friend's ghost might be unlike the living friend.

Her first words jarred his dream to pieces.

'You're a funny boy, Paul. After all that fullishness of yours this morning I met your brother Dick. He gave me something. I've got it here this minute. I want to know if it belongs to you—really. Dick says it's all your very own, but I don't more'n half believe him. I say you must have copied it out of some book. Now, di'n't ee?'

'I don't know,' said Paul huskily. 'What is it?'

'It's a piece of poetry,' she said. 'Can you make poetry?'

'I try sometimes,' said Paul.

It cost an effort to answer. He wanted her to know, and he shrank from her knowing.

'Did you make this?'

'What?'

'I'll tell it.'

She spoke the lines prettily, and put away her rustic accent, all but the music:

'"Down in the West dwells my lady Clare: Blow, O balmy wind, from the West! Bathe me in odours of her hair, Bring me her thoughts ere she fell to rest!

'"Beam, O moon, through her casement bars; Bathe in thy glory her glorious hair: Keep guard over her, sentinel stars; Watch her and keep her, all things fair!"'

'You didn't make that up out of your own head, did ee, Paul?

'Yes,' said Paul.

Here was his divinity reciting the lines with which she herself had inspired him.

'Now, couldn't ee make a piece of poetry about me?' she asked.

Paul's heart gave one great thump at his breast and stopped.

'That was about you,' he said.

'Why, you silly boy,' she said, 'you've got the name wrong. But oh, Paul, ain't ee beginning very young? Askin' for maids' thoughts afore they go to sleep! Mine, too! You'll be a regular gallows young reprobate afore you're much older. That I'm sure of.'

There was a trembling wish deep down in his heart that she had left this unsaid, but how could he be so disloyal as to let it float to the surface? He drowned it deep, but it was there. She had misunderstood. She read him coarsely, not as the May of his dreams had read him.

'Now, you write something about me, will ee, Paul?—something in my own name. Will ee?' Paul made no answer for the moment, for the request fairly carried him off his balance. 'Will ee, now?' she asked, bringing her face in front of his.

'Yes, yes, yes,' he half sighed, half panted.

'Here's a stile,' she said, springing forward with a happy gurgle of a laugh. The laugh to Paul's ear was as musical as the sad chuckle of the nightingale, and as far from sorrow as its one rival is from mirth. There was camaraderie in it, sympathy, a touch even of something confidential. 'Now, well sit down here together, and you shall make it up.'

She perched on the stile as light as a perching bird, and drew her lithe figure on one side to make room for Paul. The stile was narrow, and there was barely room for two. Paul hesitated shyly, but she patted the seat in a pretty assumption of impatience, and he obeyed.

'Paul,' she said, sliding an arm behind him, and taking hold of the side-post. 'What was it ee wanted to tell this morning?'

'This morning?' said Paul stupidly. It is one thing to resolve to be courageous in battle. It may be another thing when the fight begins.

'Now, I'm sure you haven't forgot already,' she said. 'Here! You catch hold of the post on my side. Then we shall be comfortable.' She swayed forward to make easier for him the movement she advised, and her whole figure from ankle to shoulder touched him lightly. He obeyed, and she swung back again, nestling into the curve of his arm. 'That's nice, isn't it? Now, what was ee going to tell?' Paul had not a word to say for himself. If he had ever had the audacity to picture anything in his own mind like this present truth, he would have thought it certain to be deliriously happy; but as a matter of fact he was miserable, and felt himself at the clumsiest disadvantage. 'You said,' she murmured, half reproachfully, you'd go through fire or water for me, Paul.'

'So I would,' said Paul.

'Why? she asked, nestling a little nearer. 'Why, Paul?'

'I would,' said he, rather sulkily than otherwise.

'Why?' She swayed forward again, and looked into his face. Her breath fanned his cheek. Her eyes were wide open and looked into his almost mournfully. 'Why?' Her glance hypnotized him. 'Why?'

'I love you,' he said, in a whisper.

'Do ee? she cooed. 'Oh, you silly Paul! What for?'

'I don't know,' he said. 'There never was anybody as lovely as you are.'

The words seemed to slide from him, apart from his will.

'Oh, you silly Paul Am I lovely?'

'Lovely? sighed Paul, and tangled his eyes in hers more and more.

'You'll make up that piece of poetry about me, won't ee, Paul?'

'Yes.'

The word was just audible, a breath, no more.

'You dear!' she said; and, leaning nearer and yet nearer to him, she laid her lips on his. They rested there for one thrilling instant, and then she drew back an inch or two only. 'Make it up about that,' she said, looking point blank into his eyes. Paul drooped his head and the lips met again, and fastened. A delicate fire burned him, and he curled his arm about her waist, and drew her to him. She yielded for one instant, and then slipped away with a panting laugh. 'Oh, Paul?' she said; 'you really are too dreadful for anything! Fancy! A mere child like you. I should like to know what Mr. Filmer'd say if ever he knew I'd let ee do that.'

By one of those curious intuitions to which the mind is open at times of profound excitement, Paul knew what her answer would be, but he asked the question. At first his voice made no sound; but he cleared his throat and spoke dryly, and in a tone of commonplace:

'Who is Mr. Filmer?'

'Mr. Filmer's the gentleman I'm going to be married to,' said May. 'He's a very jealous temper, and I shouldn't like him to know I'd been flirting, even with a child like you.'

It was all over.



CHAPTER IV

Paul survived. He left the church, and returned with a doubtful allegiance to Ebenezer. He joined the singing-class there, for his voice had suddenly grown harsh and deep, and he conceived himself to be a basso. The parish swarmed with vocal celebrities, and he would be one of them. He made his first visit to the class, and got there early.

Came in two young ladies in hoops, with pork-pie hats and hair done up in bags of chenille. The like figures may be seen in the drawings of John Leech, circa 1860. Each young lady had a curved nose. One nose curved inward at the bridge, and the other outward at the bridge, and if the curves had been set together they would have fitted with precision. Came in a lean lady with a purse mouth, rather open—looking like an empty voluntary-bag. Came in a stout lady, like a full voluntary-bag, the mouth close shut with a clasp. Came in a gentleman with shining rabbit teeth, smiling as if for a wager. Came in a gentleman with a deep bass voice consciously indicated in the carriage of his head—the voice garrotting him, as it were, rather high up in the collar. Came in a gentleman with heavy movable eyebrows, which looked too big for the limited playground a very small forehead afforded. Came in a small apoplectic man, bald and clean-shaven, and red and angry in the face, like an ill-conditioned baby. Came in ladies and gentlemen who smirked and slid; ladies and gentlemen who loitered, and were sheepish when by hazard they caught an eye; ladies and gentlemen crammed to suffocation with a sense of their own importance; ladies and gentlemen miserably overwhelmed with a sense of the importance of other people.

Paul knew every one of them, and had known them from childhood; and somehow they were all transformed from commonplace, and dignified into a comedy which was at once sympathetic and exquisitely droll. His narrow world had widened; his neighbours had sprung alive. His heart was tickled with a genial laughter, and his mirth tasted sweet to him, like a mellow apple. He could have hugged the crowd for sheer delight.

The conductor of the singing-class weeded Paul out at the close of the first glee, and brought his musical ambitions to an end.

'Theer are at least twelve notes in an ordinary singin' voice,' said the conductor, 'and theer ought to be eight half-tones scattered in among 'em, somewheer. You've got two notes at present, and one's a squeak and t'other's a grumble. I think you might find a more advantageous empl'yment for your time elsewheer.'

Paul submitted to this verdict with high good-humour. He retired to the far end of the schoolroom, and sat out 'the practice' with a growing sense of pleasure. He exulted in the possession of a new sense which made all these people lovable.

'Now I've found this out,' said Paul to himself, 'I shall never be lonely any more. There'll always be summat to think about—summat with a relish in it.'

He must needs, of course, try to get the relish on paper, and he wrote a great deal of boyish stuff in flagrant imitation of Dickens, and hid it, jackdaw-like, in such places as he could find. In the slattern old office where Paul was learning more or less to be a workman at his trade there was no such thing as a ceiling. Frayed mortar, with matted scraps of cow-hair in it, used to fall frequently into the type-cases whenever a high wind shook the crazy slates, and, to obviate this, some contriving person had nailed a number of sheets of brown paper to the rafters. Paul's hiding-place for his literary work was above these sheets of paper, and one day when old Armstrong stood by his side, a tintack gave way beneath the superincumbent weight, and the whole bundle of scraps in verse and prose fell at the author's feet Armstrong stooped for it, and Paul went red and white, and his legs shook beneath him. There was an upturned box by the side of the cracked and blistered old stove which warmed the room in winter, and Armstrong went to it and sat down to untie his bundle. The author had never had any confidences with anybody, and his father was one of the last people in the world to whom he would have dared to make appeal for advice or help. In his agitation he went on pecking at the case of type before him, and setting the stamps on end at random, inside out and upside down, and in any progression chance might order. The old man coughed, and Paul dropped his composing-stick into the space-box with a clatter, and spilt its contents there. Armstrong slipped the string which bound the roll of papers, and began to glance over his discovery. Paul felt as if the ramshackle building had been out at sea.

'M'm,' said Armstrong, with the merest dry tick of a tone which seemed to express inquiry and surprise. Paul started as if an arrow had gone through him, and dropped his composing-stick a second time. 'Ye're very clumsy, there, my lad,' said the old man. 'What's happening?'

Paul made no answer, and the father went back to his papers.

'"Bilsby,"' the old man hummed, half aloud, '"Bilsby is fat—fat with the comfortable fatness which has grown about him in the course of five-and-forty years of perfect self-approval. Bilsby is not great, or good, or magnanimous, or wise, or wealthy, or of long descent, or handsome, or admired; but he is happy. He gets up with Bilsby in the morning, has breakfast, dinner, tea and supper with him, and goes to bed with him at night. If Bilsby had a choice—and Bilsby hasn't—he would make no change. He has himself to feed on—an immortal feast He sits at that eternal board, before that unfailing dish, which grows the more he ruminates upon it. Fat of the fat, sweet of the sweet is Bilsby to Bilsby's palate. What will become of Bilsby when he dies? There can be no heaven for Bilsby, for he would have to hymn another glory there; There can be no fate of pain, for even if the Devil take him, there will still be Bilsby, and that fact alone would keep him happy."

'What's all this rampant wickedness, y' irreverent dog?' asked Armstrong. 'This is your writing, isn't it?'

'Yes, sir,' said Paul, feeling his throat harsh and constricted like a quill.

Armstrong said no more, but rolling up the bundle and sliding the knotted string once more about it, put it in his pocket and walked downstairs. Paul hardly dared to meet him at the mid-day dinner, but he put the best face he could upon the matter—a very pale and disturbed face it was—and presented himself at table. Nothing was said. The gray man sat with his book propped up against the bread-basket, as usual, and ate without knowing what passed his lips. The meal over, he took his arm-chair by the kitchen fire, and lit his pipe, and read with the cat perched on his shoulder. Mrs. Armstrong went to mind the shop, the rest of the family dispersed to their various avocations, and Paul sat still, listening to the ticking of the clock, and awaiting the stroke of two to take him back to work. He felt as if it would be cowardice to go earlier, but he was unhappy, and would willingly have been elsewhere.

Suddenly Armstrong reached out his hand towards the table and set down his book. Then from the coat-pocket where Paul had plainly seen it bulging he drew the roll of manuscript.

'Paul,' said the old man, 'I've been readin' this farrago, and the less that's said about it the better. I obsairve that the main part of it's devoted to the exaggerated satire of your neighbours. That's a spirit I'm sorry to notice in ye, and I regret to see that ye're already looking sulky at rebuke. The vairse,' pursued Armstrong, 'is mainly sickly, whining, puling stuff, as far away from Nature and experience as it's easily possible to be. Now, I invite ye. Listen to this.'

He began to read with a fine disdain:

'"Come not when I am dead To drop thy foolish tears upon my grave."'

Paul averted his head, and set one hand before his face. Months ago, when May Gold's perfidy was a new thing, and the whole world was darkened, he had copied these lines from the Poet Laureate with tears, and they had seemed to him a perfect expression of himself. The old man ground out the lines with increasing scorn, and Paul began to grin, and then to shake with suppressed laughter. Armstrong went on to the end unyieldingly.

'I'm not denying,' he said, a moment later, 'that I've found here and there a salt sprinkle o' common-sense. But that, my lad,' banging a hand on the manuscript page before him, 'is simply unadulterated rubbish. It's the silliest thing in the haul collection.'

Paul's reverence for his father's judgment in such matters was a tradition and a religion. 'Old Armstrong' was the parish pride as scholar and critic. The Rev. Roderic Murchison, who was a Master of Arts of Aberdeen, sat at the gray little man's feet like a pupil. Armstrong had none of the minister's Greek and Latin, but he was his master in English letters. In spite of this awful prescription of authority Paul spirted laughter.

'It's Tennyson!' he spluttered. 'It's the Poet Laureate!'

'Then,' said Armstrong, 'the Poet Laureate's a drivelling idiot, like his predecessor.'

'What?' Paul asked, underneath his breath. He had never listened to such blasphemy.

'In my day,' said Armstrong, 'a poet laid a table for men to eat and drink at. We'd Sir Walter's beef and bannocks, and puir young Byron's Athol brose. Wha calls this mingling o' skim milk an' treacle the wine o' the soul a poet ought to pour?

'Scott and Byron!' cried Paul, amazed out of all reverence. 'Why, there's more poetry in Tennyson's little finger than in both their bodies.'

'Hoots, man! hauld your silly tongue,' cried his father.

'Have you read "In Memoriam"?' cried Paul.

'No,' returned Armstrong curtly, 'I have not.'

'Then,' Paul stormed, 'what's your opinion good for?'

The old man's eyes flashed, and he made a motion as if to rise. He controlled himself, however, and reached out a hand to the hob for the clay he had relinquished a minute or two before.

'The question's fair,' he said; 'the question's fair—pairfectly fair, Paul. I misliked the manner of it, but the question's fair.'

'I beg your pardon, sir,' said Paul.

He could have knelt to him.

'They'll be having Tennyson at the Institute Library?' the old man asked. 'I'll walk over for him.'

'I beg your pardon, sir,' said Paul, 'but Tennyson——'

'Ay, ay!' said Armstrong, 'age fossilizes. It's like enough the man has a word to say. I'll look at him.'

He took his rusty old silk hat from its hook beside the eight-day clock, and went out quietly.

For the first minute in his life Paul truly loved him.

'It would ha'served me right,' he mourned, 'if he'd ha' knocked me down. It's a lot better as it is, though; but it's hard to bear.'

That afternoon, and for many a morning and afternoon for months, old Armstrong shuffled swiftly along the weedy garden, and took his seat on the upturned box beside the stove, and there studied his Tennyson and smoked his pipe. These were halcyon days for Paul, for the old man was not long obdurate, and began to halve the delight of his own reading.

'Ay, ay!' he said, by way of making his first admission, '"in My Father's house are many mansions." This chap has the key to the organ-loft' Then, a little later: 'It's clean thinking, and a bonny music' Later still, with a long, slow sigh on the word: 'Eh!' and then, unconsciously: 'Deep waters, lad, deep waters.'

He read slowly, for the dialect was new, and he was bent on mastering it. His occasional difficulties seemed strange to the boy, but then, Paul had been suckled at this fountain, and could make no allowances for the prepossessions of age, and the distaste of an old palate for a new flavour. An occasional question startled him, the answer was so obvious and simple.

'"Or where the kneeling hamlet drains The chalice of the grapes of God,"'

Armstrong read out 'D'ye find the meaning of that, Paul, lad,' he asked.

'Village church,' said Paul 'Holy Communion.'

'To be sure,' said the old man, 'to be sure. It's tight packed, but it's simple as A B C.'

There were questions Paul could not answer, and he and the old man puzzled them out together. They drew closer and closer. The boy dared to reveal his mind, and the father began to respect his opinion. By the time the warm weather was round again they were fast friends. They tramped up and down the path of the neglected garden arm-in-arm, and talked of literature and politics and the world at large. Paul had dreams, and sometimes he gave his father a glimpse of them. Armstrong preached humility.

'L'arn, my lad,' he would say, almost sternly, 'l'arn before ye try to teach.'

Paul had turned public instructor already, but that was his secret There was a sort of treason in it, for Armstrong's rival, a young and pushing tradesman, had started a weekly paper, and Paul was an anonymous contributor to its pages. This journal was called the Barfield Advertiser, and Quarry-moor, Church Vale, and Heydon Hay Gazette; but it was satirically known in the Armstrong household as the Crusher, and its leading articles (which were certainly rather turgid and pompous) were food for weekly mirth. But one day this was changed.

'Why, William,' cried Mrs. Armstrong, 'this fellow's turned quite sensible. You might ha' wrote this yourself. It's simply nayther more nor less than you was sayin' last Wednesday at this very table.'

Paul's coffee went the wrong way, and his cough caused a momentary diversion. But when Dick had vigorously thumped him on the back, and he had resumed his seat at table, Armstrong read the article aloud.

'Ay, ay!' he said at the close, 'it's certainly my own opinion, and vary cleanly put.'

Paul's coffee went the wrong way again, and again Dick thumped him on the back. When the paper had gone the round of the household the anonymous writer stole it, and carried it, neatly folded beneath his waistcoat, to the office. He knew it by heart already, but he read it insatiably over and over again. He was in print, and to be in print for the first time is to experience as fine a delirium as is to be found in love or liquor. The typed column ravished his senses, and the editorial 'we' looked imperial. He was 'we' in spite of shirt-sleeves and ink-smeared apron of herden. In those days the Times could uproot a Ministry, but its editor in his proudest hour would have been a dwarf if he had measured himself by Paul's self-appreciation. Sweet are the uses of a boy's vanity, sweeter than honey and the honeycomb.

The dreamer in his mountain eyrie felt his heart warm with a sort of fatherly pity over these bumpkin raptures. The lad blows a bubble of foolery, and it glitters and floats and bursts, and who is the worse for it? The man carves folly in brass, and breaks his head on his own monument; or forges it in steel, and stabs his own heart with it. The vanities of youth are yeast in wholesome ale. The follies of later life are mildew in the cask. The lad who never tasted Paul's intoxication may make a worthy citizen, but he will never set the Thames afire.

Paul went on writing, and thundered from the editorial pulpit weekly. He gave the Crusher a policy. Castle Barfield was to be a borough at the next redistribution of seats. Its watchwords were 'Peace, Retrenchment, and Reform.' It was to uphold the traditions of Manchester in a curious blend with the philosophy, or the want of it, of Thomas Carlyle. It assailed the Vicar of All Saints' for the introduction of a surpliced choir, and it showed a bared arm and a clenched fist to Popery.

The Jovian wielder of the Crusher's lightnings got used to being discussed at the Saturday morning table, and encountered praise and blame there with an equal countenance. In his own unplummeted depths he was Scott before the discovery of the authorship of the Waverley series; he was Junius; he was S. G. O. And not a soul ever guessed at the truth, for just as Paul had resolved to reveal his identity and claim his fame the Crusher died.

Then for a long time he was voiceless, and, having no paper balloon to float him, he went about in his own thoughts, quite like a common person. A year later, routing out the whole series of printed articles from one of his jackdaw hiding-places, he was inspired by an intense disdain, and burned them in the office stove.

All the time the world he lived in was the world he took least heed of. Until Ralston crossed him—Ralston, his man of men, and king, and deity—the only real creature was the gray old man who had begotten him. Father and son had grown to a curious sympathy, in which age never domineered because of age, or youth presumed because of youth. Armstrong the elder was a poet, though he had never printed a line; and he and Paul brought their verses to each other. They used to print at times the productions of the local bard, and their first bond of genial and equal laughter (which is one of the best bonds in life) came of their joint reading of one of his effusions. Paul had given it the dignity of type. Armstrong was his own proof-reader, and Paul read the MS. aloud, whilst his father, with balanced pen, ticked off the lines. They were headed 'Lines on a Walk I once took in the Country,' and they opened thus:

'It was upon a day in May When through the field I took my way, It was delightful for to see The sheep and lambs—they did agree.

'And as I went forth on that day I met a stile within my way, That stile which did give rest to me Again I may not no more see.

'As on my way I then did trod, The lark did roar his song to God.'

There they laughed, with tears, for this was not a jest of anybody's purposed making, but a pinch from Nature's pepper-castor, and it tickled the lungs to madness.

'Paul, lad,' said Armstrong, coming to a sudden serious end of laughter, and wiping his eyes, 'it's not an ungentle heart that finds it delightful to see the fleecy, silly people o' the fields in harmony. And the reflection on the stile's a fine bit o' pathetics. "I've been happy there," says the poor ignorance; "and I may never see it more." It's the etairnal hauntin' thoct o' man in all ages. "We've no abiding city here." "The grass withereth, the flower fadeth." "Never, never more," says poor Poe's raven. Listen, m'n! Ye'll hear Shakespeare's immortal thunder. The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces dissolve with the great globe itself and all that it inherits. It's all there, Paul. It's in the hiccoughing throat of him. Puir felly! Well just put him into decent English, and see that naebody else shall laugh at him.'

So they trimmed the local bard, and made him sober, and even mildly sweet; and when, with their joint amendments, they sent the poem home, the bard refused to be edited, declined the parcel, and took his trade elsewhere.

But the tinkering of the poor verses brought Paul and his father finally together, and from that hour onward they were friends.



CHAPTER V

And now the mind of the Exile turned to the episode of Norah MacMulty—grotesque, pitiable, laughable.

Paul had pssed his seventeenth birthday, and reckoned himself a man. He was in love again, but tentatively. He had read 'Don Juan,' and had learned a thing or two. He conceived that he had rubbed off the first soft bloom of youth, and the idea, natural to his time of life, that he was aged and experienced had taken full hold of him.

He was not wholly certain that he adored the pretty girl at the bonnet-shop. He had never spoken to her, for one thing, and had only seen her from a distance, but she did well enough to moon about, and made an excellent peg to hang verses on.

He had been away on a lovely summer evening's ramble into the quiet of the country. He had been verse-making or verse-polishing, and was in a high state of mental exaltation when he reached the darkened main street of the town about ten o'clock. He turned the corner, and walked straight into the arms of a woman, who hugged him with a drunken ardour. Her breath was fiery with gin, and the coarsely-sweet scent of it filled him with an impulse of loathing.

'Let go,' said Paul

'Deed I'll not let go,' the woman answered, in a drunken voice. 'Ye're just sent here be Providence to see a poor lonely little craychure home.'

'Let go,' said Paul again; but she clung and laughed, and, in a sudden spasm of downright horror, he put out more strength than he guessed, and wrenched himself free. The woman tottered backwards, swayed for an instant, and then fell. The back of her head came into sharp contact with the corner of the wall. She lay quite still, and Paul grew frightened. 'Here,' he said, 'take my hand. Let me help you up.' He had not expected her to answer, but her continued silence seemed dreadful. He kneeled to look closely into her face. She was quite young—not more than two or three and twenty at the outside—and she had a quantity of light auburn hair, which, though untidy, had a soft beauty of its own. Her eyes were closed, and her face was white. 'Now, don't lie there pretending to be killed,' said Paul, in an unsteady voice. She made no movement, and he rose and looked about him in dismay.

There was not a creature in the street, and the public lamps were never lighted in the summer-time. A long way off the windows of a gin-shop cast a light upon the road, and nearer, on the opposite side, a red lamp burned. With a lingering glance of fear and pity at the recumbent figure, Paul sped towards the red lamp as fast as he could lift a leg. In his agitation he gave such a tug at the bell that it clanged like a fire-alarm. The doctor's assistant, a dashing young gentleman whom Paul knew from afar, and who was remarkable to him chiefly for an expensive taste in clothing, came briskly to the door.

'There's a woman at the corner,' said Paul, 'badly hurt; I thought it best to let you know.'

The assistant snatched a hat from the hall table, and came out at once.

'Where is she?'

Paul pointed, and they ran together. The assistant had the quicker turn of speed, and reached the corner first. He was kneeling beside the woman when Paul reached him.

'Got a handkerchief?' he asked

Paul lugged half a square yard of turkey-red cotton from his pocket. 'That's the ticket,' said the assistant. He folded the handkerchief.. 'Now, hold her head up whilst I get this under it.'

Paul obeyed again, but the hair was all in a warm wet mesh of blood.

'What are you shaking at?' the assistant asked him. 'You're a pretty poor plucked un,' he added, as he tied the bandage tight across the woman's forehead.

'I'm not used to it,' said Paul, choking with nausea and pity.

'That's pretty evident,' returned the other. 'Now, get her shawl round her head whilst I hold her up. That'll do. We must get her down to the surgery. Take her by her shoulders; there. Get your arms well under her. Heave ho! Wait a minute till I settle her dress and get a good hold of her knees. Upsy daisy; march!'

They went staggeringly, not because of the weight, but by reason of the giddiness which assailed Paul. He thought it had suddenly grown foggy, for there was a mist between him and all the dimly visible objects of the night There were coloured sparks in the mist by-and-by, and when once they had got their burden through the open hall and had laid it on a plain straight couch in the surgery, Paul was glad to sit down uninvited.

'Take a sniff at that,' said the assistant, pressing an un-stoppered bottle into his hand.

Paul obeyed him. The pungent ammonia brought the tears to his eyes and took his breath away, but it dispersed the fog and stilled the wheel which had been whirling in his head The assistant had taken off his coat and rolled up his shirtsleeves, and was going about his task with professional dexterity and coolness.

'How did this happen?' he asked.

He was Paul's senior by three years at most, but he had as magisterial and assured a manner as if he had been fifty.

Paul told the story just as it happened.

'Well,' said the assistant, 'this is a pretty grave old case, and so I tell you. You may find yourself in trouble over this.'

'Find myself in trouble?' said Paul. 'Me?'

'Yes,' said the assistant; 'you.'

'You've got better work in hand than talkin' rubbish,' Paul retorted; 'stick to it.'

'Ah,' said the budding surgeon, 'well wait till the woman's conscious, if ever she is, and see what sort of a tale she has to tell.'

'It's the simple truf he's tould ye,' said the patient, in a feeble voice. 'What do ye be tryin' to frighten him for?'

'Oh, you're coming round, are you? asked the assistant; 'didn't expect it. That's a pretty nasty crack you've got.'

'Twill take more than that to kill Norah MacMulty,' said the young woman, struggling into a sitting posture, and beginning mechanically to arrange her disordered dress. 'The MacMultys is a fine fightin' famly, and it runs in the blood to take a cracked skull quite kindly. I'll be takin' a glass at the Grapes, and then I'll be goin' home, but not till I've thanked ye kindly. Has anybody seen me bonnut?'

'I shan't allow you to go to the Grapes to-night, my good woman,' said the assistant. 'Where do you live?'

She named her address, a wretched little row of tenement houses some ten score yards away.

'What's your trade?'

'Me trade, is it?' she answered, with a feeble, good-humoured laugh. 'Tis not much of a trade, anyhow; I'm a street-walker.'

She made the statement wholly commonplace in tone, and gave it with as little reluctance or embarrassment as if she had laid claim to the most respectable calling in the world.

The assistant stared and laughed, but she caught Paul's look of amazed horror.

'Well,' she said, 'why wouldn't I be? I'll go to hell for it, av coorse, for that's God's will on all of us. Tis hard lines, too, for 'tis none so fine a life when ye've tried ut. Thank ye kindly, both of yez. I'd pay ye for ut, but ye'd not be takin' a poor girl's last shillin', I know, from the good-tempered purty face of ye.'

'You're sweetly welcome,' said the assistant, busily washing his hands at the sink, and looking sideways at her. 'You're a queer fish, any way.'

''Tis a queer fish I am,' she answered, 'an' by-an'-by they'll have the cookin' of me. Fried soul,' she said, with a faint laugh. 'Begobs! that's funny; I never thought o'that before. Fried soul!'

'How old are you?' the assistant asked.

'Faith,' she said, 'I'm just past two-an'-twinty. 'Tis an agein' life, an' I look more; but 'tis God's truf I'm tellin' ye.'

'Very likely,' said the assistant, towelling his hands.

'I'll go now,' said Norah MacMulty. 'I'm a trifle unsteady with the shakin', but the drink's out of me, worse luck! and I'll be able to walk.'

'No calling at the Grapes, mind you,' said the assistant 'You'd better look in at the infirmary about eleven o'clock to-morrow.'

'I'll do that,' she answered. 'Will ye be lendin' me your shoulder as far as the dure, young man? I'll be better in a minute.'

Paul did as she requested, but he crawled with repulsion beneath her hand. The touch inspired him with loathing. He had lived a sheltered life, and had never seen an open abandonment to shame. He wondered why God allowed the degraded thing to live, and his heart ached with pity at the same time. He led her to the door, and then across the road. The assistant sent a curt 'Good-night' after him. He answered it, and the door dosed.

'Can you walk alone now?' he asked.

'I'll try,' she said, and made a staggering attempt at it.

Paul caught her, or she would have fallen.

'Take my arm,' he said to her, hardening his heart with an effort.

He blessed the darkness and the quiet of the street, but before they had gone a score of yards a door opened in a house he knew, and Armstrong came out of it.

In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the old man would have gone by dreaming, but he was alert enough at odd moments, and this chanced to be one of them. He saw Paul arm-in-arm with a bandaged drunken woman, and as he recognised his son the pair reeled together.

'Paul!' he cried. 'Good God!'

'I'm glad it's you, father,' said Paul. 'This poor creature fell at the corner yonder and cut her head terribly. I fetched young Marley to her from Dr. Hervey's, and he has seen to her. She wants to get home.'

'I'll take the other side,' said Armstrong, and the three lurched slowly along in the dimness.

'Ye're good people,' Norah MacMulty said when they had brought her to her door.

A slattern woman answered Armstrong's knock, heard the news with no discernible emotion, and helped the arrival in as if she had been a sack of coals. Armstrong and Paul went home with few words. 'Don't be startled when you see me,' Paul said at the door. 'I helped to carry her to the doctor's, and she bled horribly.'

It was not meant for an exaggeration, but he was unused to such scenes, and the woman's language more than anything else had helped to scare him from his self-possession. The hour was late already, reckoning by his custom. He washed, and went upstairs, but not to bed. He threw the window open and let in the soft, heavy night-air. Strange thoughts made a jumble in his mind. From his attic he could see, over the roofs of the houses opposite, the outlines of the Quarrymore Hills, clearly defined in the light of the rising moon. Half way between him and them the air was dimly red with the glow of the unseen furnaces in the valley. He heard the loud roar of the invisible fires, and now and then the clank of iron. His thoughts were not on these things, but he was vaguely conscious of them.

He had taken his earliest look at the real tragedy of life. The peril of the woman's soul was the first thing to emerge clearly from the chaos of his thoughts. Her flippant, reckless acceptance of the certainty of her own damnation horrified him. Out of the streets, out of the bestial degradation of that life of shame and drink, into sheer hell? No chance? No hope? Surely Christ had died! But only for those who owned Him, and called upon Him! No, no, and a thousand times no! It was not to be believed, not to be borne. It was hateful, horrible, monstrous. The poor degraded thing had punishment enough already. She was in hell already.

The bruised reed, the smoking flax! He fell upon his knees, and his soul seemed to melt in a flood of anguished pity. He wept passionately, with an incoherent clamour in his heart of 'God—God—God!'

The storm wore itself out, but he knelt there long, with his hands on the window-sill, and his face buried in them. He had been too agitated to find words, and now he was too tired and empty even to wish for them. His eyes were dry, and his lips were harsh and salt with his tears.

He looked up, and the whole night had changed. The moon rode high, and was nearly at the full. The skies were spangled with thousands on thousands of glittering stars. He thrust out his head and looked upward into the vast blue of the night Out from the stainless sky fell one warm, heavy drop full on his upturned forehead. To his worn thoughts it was like an angel's tear. He nestled beside the open window, and gazed from star to star, seeming idly to trace an intricate winding road of blue amongst them. Peace came back to him, an empty peace, no more than a mental languor. He slept at last, and awoke stiff and chill to find the light of morning creeping along a clouded east.

All that day one purpose was present to his mind. When the day's work was over and he was free, he dressed and walked into the street He roamed up and down it from end to end, and several times he diverged from it to pace the road in which Norah MacMulty lived, and to linger about the house into which he had helped her. He had something to say to Norah MacMulty, but he caught no sight of her. He went home, and to bed. Next evening he paced the streets again. There was still no sign of her, but he encountered the assistant, who nodded to him in passing. Paul stopped him.

'I beg your pardon,' he said. 'Is there any news of that poor woman?'

'Yes,' said the assistant. 'She's in for a touch of erysipelas. They kept her at the Infirmary to-day. If they'd left her at large she'd have killed herself.'

'How?' said Paul.

'Drink,' returned the assistant, and went his own way.

So Paul ceased his wanderings for a while, and a fortnight had passed before he saw the woman again.

It was a Sunday afternoon, and he was off for his customary lonely ramble. Armstrong always went upstairs for a nap after Sunday's dinner, and Paul was left without companionship.

The woman was a mile away from her home, and was sitting on the lower steps of a stile by the side of the highway. She was tidily attired, and sober. Her recent illness had left a pensive look upon her face.

'You're better?' said Paul, stopping in front of her.

She looked up in some surprise.

'Oh,' she answered. ''Tis you? I'm better, thank ye kindly. There's not many cares to ask.'

'Do you remember,' Paul demanded, with a face whiter than her own, 'what you said at the doctor's the night you were hurt?'

'No,' she replied. 'What was it?'

'The doctor asked you what your trade was,' said Paul.

'Yes,' she said; 'I mind it now.'

'Did you mean it?' Paul asked.

'Ye're a trifle over-young to turn parson,' she responded. 'Go your ways, child, and don't be bothering.'

'Don't ask me to go yet,' said Paul 'I've something I want to say to you.' His voice stuck in his throat, and she turned her glance towards him in a new surprise. 'You said,' he went on with difficulty, 'that you were sure to go to hell.'

'I'm that,' she answered dryly, drawing her shawl about her shoulders.

'Well,' said Paul, 'you shan't. I'm not going to let you.' She laughed oddly with a mere ejaculation, and stared along the road. 'Do you ever think what hell is like?' he asked.

'Would I drink if I didn't?' she answered without looking at him.

'You can't put it away by drinking.'

'I know that,' she answered, with a sudden sullen fierceness. Then, 'Ye mean well, I dare say, but ye're wastin' time. Go your ways.'

'It's no use asking,' said Paul; 'I can't do it.' She looked up at him again, and he hurried on, with a dry husk in his throat: 'I can't rest for thinking of it I can't eat I can't sleep. I can't think of anything else.'

A slight spasm contorted her lips for a mere instant, but she looked down the road again, and answered drearily:

'That's a pity.'

There was a tone of tired scorn in her words, but this, as it were, was only on the surface. There was something else below, and the sense of it urged him on.

'You have a good face,' he said. 'You were not meant——'

He checked himself.

'Me poor boy,' she answered, with another motion to arrange her shawl, 'ye can't tell me anything I don't know.'

'I can tell you something you've forgotten,' said Paul. 'I don't care what you've done; you're God's child, and while there's life there's hope.'

'Ye're not a man yet,' said Norah MacMulty; 'but if ever ye mean to be one, hould your tongue an' go.'

'I don't mind hurting you if I can do you any good by it.' 'Ye can do me no good, nor yourself neither. Here's people coming along the road, and it's ten to one they'll know ye. Ye've no right to be seen talkin' to the likes of me at your age.'

'I don't care for the people,' he answered. 'I don't care for anything but what I've got to say.'

'Well,' she said, 'if you don't care, I'm sure I don't. 'Tis no odds to me what anybody thinks.'

The people who approached were strangers, two men and two women of the working class. They passed the pair without notice, talking of their own affairs.

'I'm only two days from the hospital,' said the girl when they were out of hearing, 'and me legs gives way underneath me. If 'twas not for that, I'd not stay here. Go now; I'm tired of ye.'

'Look here,' said Paul, with the dry husk in his throat again, 'you don't like your life.'

'Faith, then,' she answered, 'I do not.'

'Then why not leave it?'

'Ye're talking like a child. How the divvle can I leave it?'

'Leave it with me,' said Paul.

That was what he had meant to say from the first, and now that he had spoken his word his difficulties seemed to fall away.

'I can't earn full wages yet, but I can get two-thirds anywhere. I can make eighteen shillings a week, and I can live on half of it. You can have the other half, and there will be no need, then—— You will find something to do in time—sewing, or ironing, or something—and then it will be easier for us both.'

'Ye're mad!' said Norah MacMulty.

'No,' said Paul, 'I'm not mad. I'm going to save your soul, Norah.'

She looked at him fixedly.

'Ye mean it?' she asked.

'I mean it,' he answered. 'I mean it in God's hearing.'

'Well,' she said, 'I'm mightily obliged to ye.'

'You're coming, Norah?'

'What's your name?'

'Armstrong—Paul Armstrong.'

'I'll remember that,' she said. 'Good-bye to ye, Paul Armstrong.'

'No,' said Paul, 'you will come to me. I shall go to look for work to-morrow, and as soon as I have found it I shall send for you, and you will come.'

'D'ye want me to live with ye?' she asked.

'No,' he answered with a strong shudder. She saw that clearly, and her colour changed. The swift distortion showed itself about her lips again. It passed away in an instant, but it left the mouth trembling. 'I want you to be away somewhere where nobody can say a word against you. I want to see you and talk to you sometimes, and know that you are going on prosperously.'

'I'm mightily obliged to ye,' she said again. 'Ye're a good little fool, but a fool you are.'

'I am not a fool for this, Norah. Nobody is a fool who tries to do God's work.'

'Anybody's a fool that tries to do God's work that way,' she answered.

'You say you are going to hell, Norah.'

'And so I am, but not for ruinin' a child that's got hysterics. I can face the divvle without havin' that on my conscience. And I'll tell ye somethin' that'll maybe turn out useful when ye grow older. Ye think because I folly a callin' that no decent woman can think of and because ye know that I drink, that I've no pride of me own. Ye're mistaken, Paul Armstrong. If ye were ten years older, and I me own woman, I'd set these in your face. D'ye mind me now?' She shook her hands before her for an instant, and withdrew them under her shawl again. 'Ye mean well, I think, but ye're just in-sultin' past bearin', an' so you are! Would I live on the 'arnin's of a child? Oh, Mary, Mary, Mother o' God!' 'she burst out, 'look down an' see how I'm trodden in the mud. Go away, go away; go away, I tell ye! I know what I am. Right well I know what I am. But d'ye think I'm that?

Black misery on your—— No. Ill not curse ye, for I believe ye meant well. But if ye're not gone, I've a scissors here, an' I'll do meself a mischief.'

The outburst overwhelmed him. The man of the world who could have stood unmoved against it would have needs been brave and cool. The torrent of her passion swept him like a straw.

'I beg your pardon,' he stammered; 'I beg your pardon with all my heart and soul.'

'Go!' she said.

He obeyed her, and the episode of Norah MacMulty came to a close.

'Paul,' said the Solitary, waking for a moment from the dream in which these old things acted themselves again before him, 'you were always a fool, but the folly of that time was better than to-day's.'



CHAPTER VI

Ralston was on the scene—Ralston in ripe middle age, massive and short of stature, with a square head and a billowy, sable-silvered head of hair; full lips, richly shadowed by his beard; an eye which twinkled like some bland star of humour at one minute and pierced like a gimlet at the next; a manner suavely dogged, jovially wilful, calmly hectoring, winning as the wiles of a child; a voice of husky sweetness, like a fog-bound clarion at times; a learning which, if it embraced nothing wholly, had squeezed some spot of vital juice out of well-nigh everything; wise, loquacious, masterful, bon-vivant; the most perfect talker of his day in England; half parson and half journalist; loyal to the bone; courageous to the bone; not an originating man, but original; a receiver, and, through his own personality, a transmitter of great thoughts to the masses; a fighting theologian; a fighting politician; a howling scoff to orthodoxy; a flying flag and peal of trumpet and tuck of drum to freedom everywhere. This was Ralston.

What should bring Paul from the inky apron, and the dusty type-cases, and the battered old founts of metal, and the worm-eaten old founts of wood, and the slattern bankrupt office into the society of such a man as this?

The Exile dreamed his dream, and a year was gone in a breath.

The Armstrong household was asleep. It was one o'clock—noon of the slumberous hours. Paul slipped downstairs in his stocking-feet, struck a match, lit the kitchen gas, and drew on his boots. Then back came the creaking bolts of the door which led to the garden. Out went the gas, and Paul, matchbox in hand, sped stealthily to the office, the summer dews falling and the weeds smelling sweet. The battered padlock on the staple of the door had been a pure pretence for years past. It locked and opened as well without the aid of a key as with it Paul lifted the outer edge of the door in both hands and swung it back cautiously, to avoid the shriek it gave when merely thrust open, and then lifted it to its former place. He mounted the stairs—there was not a nail in his boots which did not know each shred of fraying timber in them—thridded an unerring way through the outspread lumber on the floor to the stand at which he commonly worked, set the gas-bracket blazing there, and began to stack type as if for dear life, but without a copy. The clock at Trinity struck the hours half a mile away. The clock at Christ's followed a second or two later, nearer and clearer. Then a mile off, soft and mellow, but unheard unless the ear waited for them, the bells of the Old Church chimed. Three o'clock was sounding, and the summer dark was at its deepest, when Paul secured a first proof of the work on which he had been engaged, and hid away the forme in a hollow beneath the stairs.

In this wise he stole two hours from sleep nightly for a month; and at the end of that time, lo! a printed poem, molten and cast, and re-molten and re-cast, chiselled and fined and polished, and all in Paul's brain-factory, without a guiding touch of pen or pencil—the work of a year.

The night after the completion of this task Ralston lectured for the Young Men's Christian Institute, and Paul was there. He was there right early, and secured a seat in the front row. The theme was 'In Memoriam.' Ralston talked and Paul listened. In five minutes Ralston was talking to Paul. Even now, in this strange review of the things that had helped or daunted him in all his days, the self-exiled Solitary, perched alone in his eyrie in the Rocky Mountains, encompassed by amorphous smoke-cloud, whilst the unseen river gnashed on its rocky teeth and howled—even now he felt the controlling magic of the voice and manner, even now he felt the triumph which sprang from the knowledge that this man chose him from the throng, played on him with splendid improvisations, made him the receptive and distributive instrument for his thoughts.

'I know,' said the living Paul Armstrong, looking back on the dead aspiring creature he had been. 'Not a self-accusing thought! Pure worship in the eyes. And the visage! not this battered mask, but the face of eighteen! Not an ounce of alcohol ever fired his blood from his cradle till now. A meagre table all his life through—enough and barely enough. Clean hands and a pure heart, and burning ardour in the eyes. I could talk to a lad like that. Eh, me!'

The lecture was over; the audience had drained away; the great man and the Secretary were closeted for a minute; there was a chinking sound of gold. Ralston came out with a cheery 'Good-night,' and Paul was waiting at the head of the stairs.

'Mr. Ralston,' said Paul.

'Oho!' said Ralston in his sounding bass, hoarse like the deeper notes of a reed. 'My audience!'

'Will you read this, sir?'

Paul offered a paper-roll. The orator made a sideway skip out of the range of the tube, as if it had held an explosive. Paul's face fell woefully, and the great man laughed and clapped him on the shoulder.

'Walk to the station,' he said, and rolled downstairs, Paul after him, and in seventh heaven. 'What have you there?' asked Ralston, as they reached the street. 'Prose? verse? print? manuscript?—what?'

'It's in type,' said Paul. 'It is a poem, sir.'

'What will you bet on that?' asked Ralston.

'I'll take odds, sir,' said Paul 'It's never even betting.'

'Ha!' The orator turned and stopped and looked at him. 'You are in my debt, young gentleman.'

'For years past, sir.'

'What? Eh?'

'For years past.'

'I never saw your face before to-night'

'No, sir. I walk in on Sunday nights to hear you, but I go to the back of the gallery.'

'You tramp twelve miles of a Sunday night to hear me?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Summer-time, eh?'

'Any weather.'

'Present the deadly tube. I'll stand the charge.' He thrust Paul's poem into the pocket of a loose alpaca overcoat 'I was saying that you were in my debt. You made me talk ten minutes longer than I ought to have done, and I've lost my train. There's not another for forty minutes. Come and march the platform.'

'Thank you, sir.'

'What's your name?'

'Paul Armstrong, sir.'

'Armstrong? Armstrong? Father's house here in the High Street? Printer and stationer? Ah! Old Bill Armstrong. Ayrshire Scotch. Anti-Corn Law. Villiers' Committee. I know him. How do you get on together—eh?'

'My father, sir? He's the dearest friend I have in the world.'

'That's as it should be. Tell me about yourself. What are you?'

'I work in the office.'

'Compositor?'

'Compositor and pressman.'

'Many a nugget has come out of that pocket What do you read? Tennyson, I know. Whom else?'

'Anything I can get, Mr. Ralston.9

'Tell me. You're eighteen at a guess. Tell me last year's love and this year's love, and I'll prophesy.'

'It was Hazlitt at the beginning of last year, sir. Then it was Hunt, and Lamb. Now it's Thackeray.'

'Keats anywhere?'

'Oh! Keats?9 The tone was enough.

'Favourite bit of Keats now?'

'Oh, sir, you can't have favourite bits of Keats.'

'Come! The darling.'

'"St Agnes,"' said Paul; 'Chapman's Homer, "The Nightingale," "Hyperion."'

'Oh! One love at a time.'

'I can't, sir.'

'Wordsworth?'

'That's easier, Mr. Ralston. "The Intimations."' 'Byron?'

'Oh! "The Don"—miles and miles, sir.' 'Where's Shakespeare—eh?'

'In the bosom of God Almighty.'

So cheerily the talk had gone, so rapidly, he had no taint of shyness left. Here was the man of his worship since he had first dared to play the pious truant from chapel, the one man of the whole world he esteemed the greatest and the wisest. They had talked for three minutes and he was at home with his deity, and yet had lost no tremor of the adoring thrill.

'Good!' said Ralston. 'Dickens?' Paul's answer was nothing more than an inarticulate gurgle of pleasure, neither a laugh nor an exclamation. 'Carlyle?' Paul was silent, and Ralston asked in a doubtful voice: 'Not read Carlyle?'

'I'd go,' said Paul in a half whisper, 'from here to Chelsea on my hands and knees to see him.'

'The best of magnets won't draw lead,' said Ralston, and at the time Paul was puzzled by the phrase, but he blushed with pleasure when he recalled it later on. 'And Browning?'

'Ugh!' said Paul.

'Ah, well, that's natural. But, mind you, Mr. Armstrong, in a year or two you'll feel humiliated to think of your present position.'

They talked, marching up and down the platform, until the train came.

'You have been very kind, sir,' said Paul when at last the dreaded bell rang and the distant engine screamed.

'Have I?' asked Ralston. 'Remember it as a debt you'll owe to some aspiring youngster thirty years hence.'

The train came up before anything further was said. They shook hands and parted.

Then for days and weeks Paul waited for a letter, waylaying the postman every morning at the door. The letter came at last, brief and to the point:

'Have read your poem. A bright promise—not yet an achievement. Command of language more evident than individual thought. Be more yourself, but go on in hope. Let nothing discourage. Remember that personal character reveals itself in art Lofty conduct breeds the lofty ideal.'

The last phrase hit Paul hard. He was in search of the lofty ideal, and if lofty conduct would bring it, he meant to have it.

He was strolling on the next Saturday afternoon, with Ralston's letter in his pocket Saturday was a half-holiday, and he was free to do with it what he pleased. His feet took him by an unfrequented way, and in the course of an hour's devious ramble he found himself on the canal spoil-bank. The cutting was perhaps a hundred feet deep, and the artificial mounds were old enough to be covered by turf and gorse. They bore here and there a tree, and in any hollow of the hills, where the chimneys and furnace-fires were hidden, it needed no special gift of the imagination to make a rolling prairie of the scene, or at least a grouse-peopled moor.

Paul sat down in such a hollow and read Ralston's letter for the thousandth time, and resolved anew on lofty conduct Suddenly he was aware of an approaching noise of voices, and in a little while a rabble of some twenty men and youths came charging down the slope to where he lounged in communion with his own fancies. The small crowd was noisy and excited, and Paul noticed some pallid, staring faces as it hurried by. The whole contingent, wrangling and cursing unintelligibly, came to a sudden halt in the bend of the hollow. Here a man in corduroys and a rabbit-skin waistcoat called in a stentorian voice for order, and the babel gradually died down.

'These are the draws,' said the man in the rabbit-skin waistcoat, waving a dirty scrap of paper in a dirtier hand—'these are the draws for the first encounter.'

He began to read a list of names. The first was answered in a tone of bullying jocundity. The second and the third name each elicited a growl At the call of the fourth name there was no response.

'Blades!' called the man in the rabbit-skin waistcoat—'Ikey Blades of Quanymoor!'

Everybody turned to stare at Paul.

'That's him,' said one. 'Course it is,' said another.

'Bin yo Ikey Blades from Quarrymoor?' asked the man with the list.

'No,' said Paul

The man cursed, devoting himself and Paul to unnameable penalties. He wound up by asking Paul what he was doing. He wrapped this simple inquiry in a robe of blasphemies. 'Nothing particular,' Paul answered. 'What's the matter?' 'Tak' it easy with him,' said a burly, hoarse-voiced man. 'Beest thee i' the Major's pay?' 'Major?' asked Paul. 'What Major?' 'Why—Major Fellowes!'

'No,' said Paul, laughing. 'I've got no more to do with the police than thee hast. What is it, lads? A bit of a match, eh? Goo along. Need'st ha' no fear o' me.'

He had been fighting his way out of the local dialect for half a dozen years, but it was expedient not to forget it here.

'I dunno about that,' said the man with the waistcoat. 'Who bist?'

'Armstrong's my naaem,' said Paul. 'I've lived i' the Barfield Road all my life.'

'Can ye put 'em up?' was the next query. 'Why, yes,' said Paul. 'I can put 'em up if I see rayson for it.'

'All right We'll tak' yo on in place of Ikey Blades. This is the fust chap yo'n ha' to tackle. Billy Tunks he is—comes from Virgin's End.'

Billy Tunks (or Tonks, more probably) carried one of the pale and staring faces Paul had already noticed. He and Paul surveyed each other.

The man in the rabbit-skin waistcoat, having arranged preliminaries, explained to Paul. This was 'a little bit of a friendly turn-up with the weepons of Natur',' intended to settle the disputed qualities of the youth of eight local parishes. Paul's presence, it appeared, was entirely providential, for, with the exception of the seven candidates here in search of glory, there was nobody present who had not at one time or another 'fowt' for money.

'I suppose,' said Paul's informant, 'you've never fowt for money?'

'No,' Paul answered, 'I've never fowt for money. Mek yourself easy on that score.'

'Oh,' said the other, 'I wasn't castin' no suspicion. But it's just a quiet bit o' fun like for them as ain't been blooded in a reg'lar way. It's a bit o' fun for the young uns. Billy an' yov comes second.'

'All right,' said Paul.

He thought of Ralston's letter, and laughed. Lofty conduct breeds the lofty ideal. What would Ralston say to this, he wondered? Not that the thing had a touch of barbarism to his mind. It was rough, of course, but it was inspiring, and he was used to it. He had seen a great deal of this peculiar sport, and had a warm liking for it. Being in it was better than looking on, but even looking on was pleasant.

'Now, lads,' said the master of the ceremonies, 'get to your corners. An', gentlemen-sports all, no shoutin'.'

The business of the afternoon began in earnest A brace of lads stood up, stripped to the waist They shook hands, and set to work. The men were mere clowns, but the exhibition was anything but clownish. In that part of the world, at least, the traditions of the game were kept alive, and there was plenty of sound scientific fighting to be seen. Paul knew enough to recognise it when he saw it, and he had not watched two minutes before he knew that in this instance he was hopelessly outclassed.