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+The Project Gutenberg EBook The Weavers, by Gilbert Parker, v3
+#90 in our series by Gilbert Parker
+
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+**EBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
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+*****These EBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers*****
+
+
+Title: The Weavers, Volume 3.
+
+Author: Gilbert Parker
+
+Release Date: August, 2004  [EBook #6263]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on November 14, 2002]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
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+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+
+
+
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WEAVERS, BY PARKER, V3 ***
+
+
+
+This eBook was produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+THE WEAVERS
+
+By Gilbert Parker
+
+
+BOOK III.
+
+
+XV.       SOOLSBY'S HAND UPON THE CURTAIN
+XVI.      THE DEBT AND THE ACCOUNTING
+XVII.     THE WOMAN OF THE CROSS-ROADS
+XVIII.    TIME, THE IDOL-BREAKER
+XIX.      SHARPER THAN A SWORD
+XX.       EACH AFTER HIS OWN ORDER
+XXI.      "THERE IS NOTHING HIDDEN WHICH SHALL NOT BE REVEALED"
+XXII.     AS IN A GLASS DARKLY
+XXIII.    THE TENTS OF CUSHAN
+XXIV.     THE QUESTIONER
+XXV.      THE VOICE THROUGH THE DOOR
+XXVI.     "I OWE YOU NOTHING"
+XXVII.    THE AWAKENING
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+SOOLSBY'S HAND UPON THE CURTAIN
+
+Faith raised her eyes from the paper before her and poised her head
+meditatively.
+
+"How long is it, friend, since--"
+
+"Since he went to Egypt?"
+
+"Nay, since thee--"
+
+"Since I went to Mass?" he grumbled humorously.
+
+She laughed whimsically.  "Nay, then, since thee made the promise--"
+
+"That I would drink no more till his return--ay, that was my bargain;
+till then and no longer!  I am not to be held back then, unless I change
+my mind when I see him.  Well, 'tis three years since--"
+
+"Three years!  Time hasn't flown.  Is it not like an old memory, his
+living here in this house, Soolsby, and all that happened then?"
+
+Soolsby looked at her over his glasses, resting his chin on the back of
+the chair he was caning, and his lips worked in and out with a suppressed
+smile.
+
+"Time's got naught to do with you.  He's afeard of you," he continued.
+"He lets you be."
+
+"Friend, thee knows I am almost an old woman now."  She made marks
+abstractedly upon the corner of a piece of paper.  "Unless my hair turns
+grey presently I must bleach it, for 'twill seem improper it should
+remain so brown."
+
+She smoothed it back with her hand.  Try as she would to keep it trim
+after the manner of her people, it still waved loosely on her forehead
+and over her ears.  And the grey bonnet she wore but added piquancy to
+its luxuriance, gave a sweet gravity to the demure beauty of the face it
+sheltered.
+
+"I am thirty now," she murmured, with a sigh, and went on writing.
+
+The old man's fingers moved quickly among the strips of cane, and, after
+a silence, without raising his head, he said: "Thirty, it means naught."
+
+"To those without understanding," she rejoined drily.
+
+"'Tis tough understanding why there's no wedding-ring on yonder finger.
+There's been many a man that's wanted it, that's true--the Squire's son
+from Bridgley, the lord of Axwood Manor, the long soldier from Shipley
+Wood, and doctors, and such folk aplenty.  There's where understanding
+fails."
+
+Faith's face flushed, then it became pale, and her eyes, suffused,
+dropped upon the paper before her.  At first it seemed as though she must
+resent his boldness; but she had made a friend of him these years past,
+and she knew he meant no rudeness.  In the past they had talked of things
+deeper and more intimate still.  Yet there was that in his words which
+touched a sensitive corner of her nature.
+
+"Why should I be marrying?" she asked presently.  "There was my sister's
+son all those years.  I had to care for him."
+
+"Ay, older than him by a thimbleful!" he rejoined.
+
+"Nay, till he came to live in this hut alone older by many a year.  Since
+then he is older than me by fifty.  I had not thought of marriage before
+he went away.  Squire's son, soldier, or pillman, what were they to me!
+He needed me.  They came, did they?  Well, and if they came?"
+
+"And since the Egyptian went?"
+
+A sort of sob came into her throat.  "He does not need me, but he may--he
+will one day; and then I shall be ready.  But now--"
+
+Old Soolsby's face turned away.  His house overlooked every house in the
+valley beneath: he could see nearly every garden; he could even recognise
+many in the far streets.  Besides, there hung along two nails on the wall
+a telescope, relic of days when he sailed the main.  The grounds of the
+Cloistered House and the fruit-decked garden-wall of the Red Mansion were
+ever within his vision.  Once, twice, thrice, he had seen what he had
+seen, and dark feelings, harsh emotions, had been roused in him.
+
+"He will need us both--the Egyptian will need us both one day," he
+answered now; "you more than any, me because I can help him, too--ay,
+I can help him.  But married or single you could help him; so why waste
+your days here?"
+
+"Is it wasting my days to stay with my father?  He is lonely, most lonely
+since our Davy went away; and troubled, too, for the dangers of that life
+yonder.  His voice used to shake when he prayed, in those days when Davy
+was away in the desert, down at Darfur and elsewhere among the rebel
+tribes.  He frightened me then, he was so stern and still.  Ah, but that
+day when we knew he was safe, I was eighteen, and no more!" she added,
+smiling.  "But, think you, I could marry while my life is so tied to him
+and to our Egyptian?"
+
+No one looking at her limpid, shining blue eyes but would have set her
+down for twenty-three or twenty-four, for not a line showed on her smooth
+face; she was exquisite of limb and feature, and had the lissomeness of a
+girl of fifteen.  There was in her eyes, however, an unquiet sadness; she
+had abstracted moments when her mind seemed fixed on some vexing problem.
+Such a mood suddenly came upon her now.  The pen lay by the paper
+untouched, her hands folded in her lap, and a long silence fell upon
+them, broken only by the twanging of the strips of cane in Soolsby's
+hands.  At last, however, even this sound ceased; and the two scarce
+moved as the sun drew towards the middle afternoon.  At last they were
+roused by the sound of a horn, and, looking down, they saw a four-in-hand
+drawing smartly down the road to the village over the gorse-spread
+common, till it stopped at the Cloistered House.  As Faith looked, her
+face slightly flushed.  She bent forward till she saw one figure get down
+and, waving a hand to the party on the coach as it moved on, disappear
+into the gateway of the Cloistered House.
+
+"What is the office they have given him?" asked Soolsby, disapproval in
+his tone, his eyes fixed on the disappearing figure.
+
+"They have made Lord Eglington Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs," she
+answered.
+
+"And what means that to a common mind?"
+
+"That what his Government does in Egypt will mean good or bad to our
+Egyptian," she returned.
+
+"That he can do our man good or ill?" Soolsby asked sharply--"that he,
+yonder, can do that?"
+
+She inclined her head.
+
+"When I see him doing ill--well, when I see him doing that"--he snatched
+up a piece of wood from the floor--"then I will break him, so!"
+
+He snapped the stick across his knee, and threw the pieces on the ground.
+He was excited.  He got to his feet and walked up and down the little
+room, his lips shut tight, his round eyes flaring.
+
+Faith watched him in astonishment.  In the past she had seen his face
+cloud over, his eyes grow sulky, at the mention of Lord Eglington's name;
+she knew that Soolsby hated him; but his aversion now was more definite
+and violent than he had before shown, save on that night long ago when
+David went first to Egypt, and she had heard hard words between them in
+this same hut.  She supposed it one of those antipathies which often grow
+in inverse ratio to the social position of those concerned.  She replied
+in a soothing voice:
+
+"Then we shall hope that he will do our Davy only good."
+
+"You would not wish me to break his lordship?  You would not wish it?"
+He came over to her, and looked sharply at her.  "You would not wish it?"
+he repeated meaningly.
+
+She evaded his question.  "Lord Eglington will be a great man one day
+perhaps," she answered.  "He has made his way quickly.  How high he has
+climbed in three years--how high!"
+
+Soolsby's anger was not lessened.  "Pooh!  Pooh!  He is an Earl.  An Earl
+has all with him at the start--name, place, and all.  But look at our
+Egyptian!  Look at Egyptian David--what had he but his head and an honest
+mind?  What is he?  He is the great man of Egypt.  Tell me, who helped
+Egyptian David?  That second-best lordship yonder, he crept about coaxing
+this one and wheedling that.  I know him--I know him.  He wheedles and
+wheedles.  No matter whether 'tis a babe or an old woman, he'll talk, and
+talk, and talk, till they believe in him, poor folks!  No one's too small
+for his net.  There's Martha Higham yonder.  She's forty five.  If he
+sees her, as sure as eggs he'll make love to her, and fill her ears with
+words she'd never heard before, and 'd never hear at all if not from him.
+Ay, there's no man too sour and no woman too old that he'll not blandish,
+if he gets the chance."
+
+As he spoke Faith shut her eyes, and her fingers clasped tightly
+together--beautiful long, tapering fingers, like those in Romney's
+pictures.  When he stopped, her eyes opened slowly, and she gazed before
+her down towards that garden by the Red Mansion where her lifetime had
+been spent.
+
+"Thee says hard words, Soolsby," she rejoined gently.  "But maybe thee is
+right."  Then a flash of humour passed over her face.  "Suppose we ask
+Martha Higham if the Earl has 'blandished' her.  If the Earl has
+blandished Martha, he is the very captain of deceit.  Why, he has himself
+but twenty-eight years.  Will a man speak so to one older than himself,
+save in mockery?  So, if thee is right in this, then--then if he speak
+well to deceive and to serve his turn, he will also speak ill; and he
+will do ill when it may serve his turn; and so he may do our Davy ill,
+as thee says, Soolsby."
+
+She rose to her feet and made as if to go, but she kept her face from
+him.  Presently, however, she turned and looked at him.  "If he does ill
+to Davy, there will be those like thee, Soolsby, who will not spare him."
+
+His fingers opened and shut maliciously, he nodded dour assent.  After an
+instant, while he watched her, she added: "Thee has not heard my lord is
+to marry?"
+
+"Marry--who is the blind lass?"
+
+"Her name is Maryon, Miss Hylda Maryon: and she has a great fortune.  But
+within a month it is to be."
+
+"Thee remembers the woman of the cross-roads, her that our Davy--"
+
+"Her the Egyptian kissed, and put his watch in her belt--ay,
+Kate Heaver!"
+
+"She is now maid to her Lord Eglington will wed.  She is to spend
+to-night with us."
+
+"Where is her lad that was, that the Egyptian rolled like dough in a
+trough?"
+
+"Jasper Kimber?  He is at Sheffield.  He has been up and down, now sober
+for a year, now drunken for a month, now in, now out of a place, until
+this past year.  But for this whole year he has been sober, and he may
+keep his pledge.  He is working in the trades-unions.  Among his fellow-
+workers he is called a politician--if loud speaking and boasting can make
+one.  Yet if these doings give him stimulant instead of drink, who shall
+complain?"
+
+Soolsby's head was down.  He was looking out over the far hills, while
+the strips of cane were idle in his hands.  "Ay, 'tis true--'tis true,"
+he nodded.  "Give a man an idee which keeps him cogitating, makes him
+think he's greater than he is, and sets his pulses beating, why, that's
+the cure to drink.  Drink is friendship and good company and big thoughts
+while it lasts; and it's lonely without it, if you've been used to it.
+Ay, but Kimber's way is best.  Get an idee in your noddle, to do a thing
+that's more to you than work or food or bed, and 'twill be more than
+drink, too."
+
+He nodded to himself, then began weaving the strips of cane furiously.
+Presently he stopped again, and threw his head back with a chuckle.
+"Now, wouldn't it be a joke, a reg'lar first-class joke, if Kimber and
+me both had the same idee, if we was both workin' for the same thing--
+an' didn't know it?  I reckon it might be so."
+
+"What end is thee working for, friend?  If the public prints speak true,
+Kimber is working to stand for Parliament against Lord Eglington."
+
+Soolsby grunted and laughed in his throat.  "Now, is that the game of
+Mister Kimber?  Against my Lord Eglington!  Hey, but that's a joke, my
+lord!"
+
+"And what is thee working for, Soolsby?"
+
+"What do I be working for?  To get the Egyptian back to England--what
+else?"
+
+"That is no joke."
+
+"Ay, but 'tis a joke."  The old man chuckled.  "'Tis the best joke in the
+boilin'."  He shook his head and moved his body backwards and forwards
+with glee.  "Me and Kimber!  Me and Kimber!" he roared, "and neither of
+us drunk for a year--not drunk for a whole year.  Me and Kimber--and
+him!"
+
+Faith put her hand on his shoulder.  "Indeed, I see no joke, but only
+that which makes my heart thankful, Soolsby."
+
+"Ay, you will be thankful, you will be thankful, by-and-by," he said,
+still chuckling, and stood up respectfully to show her out.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+THE DEBT AND THE ACCOUNTING
+
+His forehead frowning, but his eyes full of friendliness, Soolsby watched
+Faith go down the hillside and until she reached the main road.  Here,
+instead of going to the Red Mansion, she hesitated a moment, and then
+passed along a wooded path leading to the Meetinghouse, and the
+graveyard.  It was a perfect day of early summer, the gorse was in full
+bloom, and the may and the hawthorn were alive with colour.  The path she
+had taken led through a narrow lane, overhung with blossoms and greenery.
+By bearing away to the left into another path, and making a detour, she
+could reach the Meeting-house through a narrow lane leading past a now
+disused mill and a small, strong stream flowing from the hill above.
+
+As she came down the hill, other eyes than Soolsby's watched her.  From
+his laboratory--the laboratory in which his father had worked, in which
+he had lost his life--Eglington had seen the trim, graceful figure.  He
+watched it till it moved into the wooded path.  Then he left his garden,
+and, moving across a field, came into the path ahead of her.  Walking
+swiftly, he reached the old mill, and waited.
+
+She came slowly, now and again stooping to pick a flower and place it in
+her belt.  Her bonnet was slung on her arm, her hair had broken a little
+loose and made a sort of hood round the face, so still, so composed, into
+which the light of steady, soft, apprehending eyes threw a gentle
+radiance.  It was a face to haunt a man when the storm of life was round
+him.  It had, too, a courage which might easily become a delicate
+stubbornness, a sense of duty which might become sternness, if roused by
+a sense of wrong to herself or others.
+
+She reached the mill and stood and listened towards the stream and the
+waterfall.  She came here often.  The scene quieted her in moods of
+restlessness which came from a feeling that her mission was interrupted,
+that half her life's work had been suddenly taken from her.  When David
+went, her life had seemed to shrivel; for with him she had developed as
+he had developed; and when her busy care of him was withdrawn, she had
+felt a sort of paralysis which, in a sense, had never left her.  Then
+suitors had come--the soldier from Shipley Wood, the lord of Axwood
+Manor, and others, and, in a way, a new sense was born in her, though she
+was alive to the fact that the fifteen thousand pounds inherited from her
+Uncle Benn had served to warm the air about her into a wider circle.  Yet
+it was neither to soldier, nor squire, nor civil engineer, nor surgeon
+that the new sense stirring in her was due.  The spring was too far
+beneath to be found by them.
+
+When, at last, she raised her head, Lord Eglington was in the path,
+looking at her with a half-smile.  She did not start, but her face turned
+white, and a mist came before her eyes.
+
+Quickly, however, as though fearful lest he should think he could trouble
+her composure, she laid a hand upon herself.
+
+He came near to her and held out his hand.  "It has been a long six
+months since we met here," he said.
+
+She made no motion to take his hand.  "I find days grow shorter as I grow
+older," she rejoined steadily, and smoothed her hair with her hand,
+making ready to put on her bonnet.
+
+"Ah, do not put it on," he urged quickly, with a gesture.  "It becomes
+you so--on your arm."
+
+She had regained her self-possession.  Pride, the best weapon of a woman,
+the best tonic, came to her resource.  "Thee loves to please thee at any
+cost," she replied.  She fastened the grey strings beneath her chin.
+
+"Would it be costly to keep the bonnet on your arm?"
+
+"It is my pleasure to have it on my head, and my pleasure has some value
+to myself."
+
+"A moment ago," he rejoined laughing, "it was your pleasure to have it on
+your arm."
+
+"Are all to be monotonous except Lord Eglington?  Is he to have the only
+patent of change?"
+
+"Do I change?"  He smiled at her with a sense of inquisition, with an air
+that seemed to say, "I have lifted the veil of this woman's heart; I am
+the master of the situation."
+
+She did not answer to the obvious meaning of his words, but said:
+
+"Thee has done little else but change, so far as eye can see.  Thee and
+thy family were once of Quaker faith, but thee is a High Churchman now.
+Yet they said a year ago thee was a sceptic or an infidel."
+
+"There is force in what you say," he replied.  "I have an inquiring mind;
+I am ever open to reason.  Confucius said: 'It is only the supremely wise
+or the deeply ignorant who never alter.'"
+
+"Thee has changed politics.  Thee made a 'sensation, but that was not
+enough.  Thee that was a rebel became a deserter."
+
+He laughed.  "Ah, I was open to conviction!  I took my life in my hands,
+defied consequences."  He laughed again.
+
+"It brought office."
+
+"I am Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs," he murmured complacently.
+
+"Change is a policy with thee, I think.  It has paid thee well, so it
+would seem."
+
+"Only a fair rate of interest for the capital invested and the risks I've
+taken," he answered with an amused look.
+
+"I do not think that interest will increase.  Thee has climbed quickly,
+but fast climbing is not always safe climbing."
+
+His mood changed.  His voice quickened, his face lowered.  "You think I
+will fail?  You wish me to fail?"
+
+"In so far as thee acts uprightly, I wish thee well.  But if, out of
+office, thee disregards justice and conscience and the rights of others,
+can thee be just and faithful in office?  Subtlety will not always avail.
+The strong man takes the straight course.  Subtlety is not intellect."
+
+He flushed.  She had gone to the weakest point in his defences.  His
+vanity was being hurt.  She had an advantage now.
+
+"You are wrong," he protested.  "You do not understand public life, here
+in a silly Quaker village."
+
+"Does thee think that all that happens in 'public life' is of
+consequence?  That is not sensible.  Thee is in the midst of a thousand
+immaterial things, though they have importance for the moment.  But the
+chief things that matter to all, does thee not know that a 'silly Quaker
+village' may realise them to the full--more fully because we see them
+apart from the thousand little things that do not matter?  I remember a
+thing in political life that mattered.  It was at Heddington after the
+massacre at Damascus.  Does thee think that we did not know thee spoke
+without principle then, and only to draw notice?"
+
+"You would make me into a demagogue," he said irritably.
+
+"Thee is a demagogue," she answered candidly.
+
+"Why did you never say all this to me long ago?  Years have passed since
+then, and since then you and I have--have been friends.  You have--"
+
+He paused, for she made a protesting motion, and a fire sprang into her
+eyes.  Her voice got colder.  "Thee made me believe--ah, how many times
+did we speak together?  Six times it was, not more.  Thee made me believe
+that what I thought or said helped thee to see things better.  Thee said
+I saw things truly like a child, with the wisdom of a woman.  Thee
+remembers that?"
+
+"It was so," he put in hastily.
+
+"No, not for a moment so, though I was blinded to think for an instant
+that it was.  Thee subtly took the one way which could have made me
+listen to thee.  Thee wanted help, thee said; and if a word of mine could
+help thee now and then, should I withhold it, so long as I thought thee
+honest?"
+
+"Do you think I was not honest in wanting your friendship?"
+
+"Nay, it was not friendship thee wanted, for friendship means a giving
+and a getting.  Thee was bent on getting what was, indeed, of but little
+value save to the giver; but thee gave nothing; thee remembered nothing
+of what was given thee."
+
+"It is not so, it is not so," he urged eagerly, nervously.  "I gave, and
+I still give."
+
+"In those old days, I did not understand," she went on, "what it was thee
+wanted.  I know now.  It was to know the heart and mind of a woman--of a
+woman older than thee.  So that thee should have such sort of experience,
+though I was but a foolish choice of the experiment.  They say thee has a
+gift for chemistry like thy father; but if thee experiments no more
+wisely in the laboratory than with me, thee will not reach distinction."
+
+"Your father hated my father and did not believe in him, I know not why,
+and you are now hating and disbelieving me."
+
+"I do not know why my father held the late Earl in abhorrence; I know he
+has no faith in thee; and I did ill in listening to thee, in believing
+for one moment there was truth in thee.  But no, no, I think I never
+believed it.  I think that even when thee said most, at heart I believed
+least."
+
+"You doubt that?  You doubt all I said to you?" he urged softly, coming
+close to her.
+
+She drew aside slightly.  She had steeled herself for this inevitable
+interview, and there was no weakening of her defences; but a great
+sadness came into her eyes, and spread over her face, and to this was
+added, after a moment, a pity which showed the distance she was from him,
+the safety in which she stood.
+
+"I remember that the garden was beautiful, and that thee spoke as though
+thee was part of the garden.  Thee remembers that, at our meeting in the
+Cloistered House, when the woman was ill, I had no faith in thee; but
+thee spoke with grace, and turned common things round about, so that they
+seemed different to the ear from any past hearing; and I listened.  I did
+not know, and I do not know now, why it is my duty to shun any of thy
+name, and above all thyself; but it has been so commanded by my father
+all my life; and though what he says may be in a little wrong, in much it
+must ever be right."
+
+"And so, from a hatred handed down, your mind has been tuned to shun even
+when your heart was learning to give me a home--Faith?"
+
+She straightened herself.  "Friend, thee will do me the courtesy to
+forget to use my Christian name.  I am not a child-indeed, I am well on
+in years"--he smiled--"and thee has no friendship or kinship for warrant.
+If my mind was tuned to shun thee, I gave proof that it was willing to
+take thee at thine own worth, even against the will of my father, against
+the desire of David, who knew thee better than I--he gauged thee at first
+glance."
+
+"You have become a philosopher and a statesman," he said ironically.
+"Has your nephew, the new Joseph in Egypt, been giving you instructions
+in high politics?  Has he been writing the Epistles of David to the
+Quakers?"
+
+"Thee will leave his name apart," she answered with dignity.  "I have
+studied neither high politics nor statesmanship, though in the days when
+thee did flatter me thee said I had a gift for such things.  Thee did not
+speak the truth.  And now I will say that I do not respect thee.  No
+matter how high thee may climb, still I shall not respect thee; for thee
+will ever gain ends by flattery, by subtlety, and by using every man and
+every woman for selfish ends.  Thee cannot be true-not even to that which
+by nature is greatest in thee.".
+
+He withered under her words.
+
+"And what is greatest in me?" he asked abruptly, his coolness and self-
+possession striving to hold their own.
+
+"That which will ruin thee in the end."  Her eyes looked beyond his into
+the distance, rapt and shining; she seemed scarcely aware of his
+presence.  "That which will bring thee down--thy hungry spirit of
+discovery.  It will serve thee no better than it served the late Earl.
+But thee it will lead into paths ending in a gulf of darkness."
+
+"Deborah!" he answered, with a rasping laugh.  "Continuez!  Forewarned
+is forearmed."
+
+"No, do not think I shall be glad," she answered, still like one in a
+dream.  "I shall lament it as I lament--as I lament now.  All else fades
+away into the end which I see for thee.  Thee will live alone without a
+near and true friend, and thee will die alone, never having had a true
+friend.  Thee will never be a true friend, thee will never love truly man
+or woman, and thee will never find man or woman who will love thee truly,
+or will be with thee to aid thee in the dark and falling days."
+
+"Then," he broke in sharply, querulously, "then, I will stand alone.
+I shall never come whining that I have been ill-used, to fate or fortune,
+to men or to the Almighty."
+
+"That I believe.  Pride will build up in thee a strength which will be
+like water in the end.  Oh, my lord," she added, with a sudden change in
+her voice and manner, "if thee could only be true--thee who never has
+been true to any one!"
+
+"Why does a woman always judge a man after her own personal experience
+with him, or what she thinks is her own personal experience?"
+
+A robin hopped upon the path before her.  She watched it for a moment
+intently, then lifted her head as the sound of a bell came through the
+wood to her.  She looked up at the sun, which was slanting towards
+evening.  She seemed about to speak, but with second thought, moved on
+slowly past the mill and towards the Meeting-house.  He stepped on beside
+her.  She kept her eyes fixed in front of her, as though oblivious of his
+presence.
+
+"You shall hear me speak.  You shall listen to what I have to say, though
+it is for the last time," he urged stubbornly.  "You think ill of me.
+Are you sure you are not pharisaical?"
+
+"I am honest enough to say that which hurts me in the saying.  I do not
+forget that to believe thee what I think is to take all truth from what
+thee said to me last year, and again this spring when the tulips first
+came and there was good news from Egypt."
+
+"I said," he rejoined boldly, "that I was happier with you than with any
+one else alive.  I said that what you thought of me meant more to me than
+what any one else in the world thought; and that I say now, and will
+always say it."
+
+The old look of pity came into her face.  "I am older than thee by two
+years," she answered quaintly, "and I know more of real life, though I
+have lived always here.  I have made the most of the little I have seen;
+thee has made little of the much that thee has seen.  Thee does not know
+the truth concerning thee.  Is it not, in truth, vanity which would have
+me believe in thee?  If thee was happier with me than with any one alive,
+why then did thee make choice of a wife even in the days thee was
+speaking to me as no man shall ever speak again?  Nothing can explain
+so base a fact.  No, no, no, thee said to me what thee said to others,
+and will say again without shame.  But--but see, I will forgive; yes, I
+will follow thee with good wishes, if thee will promise to help David,
+whom thee has ever disliked, as, in the place held by thee, thee can do
+now.  Will thee offer this one proof, in spite of all else that
+disproves, that thee spoke any words of truth to me in the Cloistered
+House, in the garden by my father's house, by yonder mill, and hard by
+the Meeting-house yonder-near to my sister's grave by the willow-tree?
+Will thee do that for me?"
+
+He was about to reply, when there appeared in the path before them Luke
+Claridge.  His back was upon them, but he heard their footsteps and swung
+round.  As though turned to stone, he waited for them.  As they
+approached, his lips, dry and pale, essayed to speak, but no sound came.
+A fire was in his eyes which boded no good.  Amazement, horror, deadly
+anger, were all there, but, after a moment, the will behind the tumult
+commanded it, the wild light died away, and he stood calm and still
+awaiting them.  Faith was as pale as when she had met Eglington.  As she
+came nearer, Luke Claridge said, in a low voice:
+
+"How do I find thee in this company, Faith?"  There was reproach
+unutterable in his voice, in his face.  He seemed humiliated and shamed,
+though all the while a violent spirit in him was struggling for the
+mastery.
+
+"As I came this way to visit my sister's grave I met my lord by the mill.
+He spoke to me, and, as I wished a favour of him, I walked with him
+thither--but a little way.  I was going to visit my sister's grave."
+
+"Thy sister's grave!"  The fire flamed up again, but the masterful will
+chilled it down, and he answered: "What secret business can thee have
+with any of that name which I have cast out of knowledge or notice?"
+
+Ignorant as he was of the old man's cause for quarrel or dislike,
+Eglington felt himself aggrieved, and, therefore, with an advantage.
+
+"You had differences with my father, sir," he said.  "I do not know what
+they were, but they lasted his lifetime, and all my life you have treated
+me with aversion.  I am not a pestilence.  I have never wronged you.
+I have lived your peaceful neighbour under great provocation, for your
+treatment would have done me harm if my place were less secure.  I think
+I have cause for complaint."
+
+"I have never acted in haste concerning thee, or those who went before
+thee.  What business had thee with him, Faith?" he asked again.  His
+voice was dry and hard.
+
+Her impulse was to tell the truth, and so for ever have her conscience
+clear, for there would never be any more need for secrecy.  The wheel of
+understanding between Eglington and herself had come full circle, and
+there was an end.  But to tell the truth would be to wound her father, to
+vex him against Eglington even as he had never yet been vexed.  Besides,
+it was hard, while Eglington was there, to tell what, after all, was the
+sole affair of her own life.  In one literal sense, Eglington was not
+guilty of deceit.  Never in so many words had he said to her: "I love
+you;" never had he made any promise to her or exacted one; he had done no
+more than lure her to feel one thing, and then to call it another thing.
+Also there was no direct and vital injury, for she had never loved him;
+though how far she had travelled towards that land of light and trial she
+could never now declare.  These thoughts flashed through her mind as she
+stood looking at her father.  Her tongue seemed imprisoned, yet her soft
+and candid eyes conquered the austerity in the old man's gaze.
+
+Eglington spoke for her.
+
+"Permit me to answer, neighbour," he said.  "I wished to speak with
+your daughter, because I am to be married soon, and my wife will, at
+intervals, come here to live.  I wished that she should not be shunned
+by you and yours as I have been.  She would not understand, as I do not.
+Yours is a constant call to war, while all your religion is an appeal for
+peace.  I wished to ask your daughter to influence you to make it
+possible for me and mine to live in friendship among you.  My wife will
+have some claims upon you.  Her mother was an American, of a Quaker
+family from Derbyshire.  She has done nothing to merit your aversion."
+
+Faith listened astonished and baffled.  Nothing of this had he said to
+her.  Had he meant to say it to her?  Had it been in his mind?  Or was it
+only a swift adaptation to circumstances, an adroit means of working upon
+the sympathies of her father, who, she could see, was in a quandary?
+Eglington had indeed touched the old man as he had not been touched in
+thirty years and more by one of his name.  For a moment the insinuating
+quality of the appeal submerged the fixed idea in a mind to which the
+name of Eglington was anathema.
+
+Eglington saw his advantage.  He had felt his way carefully, and he
+pursued it quickly.  "For the rest, your daughter asked what I was ready
+to offer--such help as, in my new official position, I can give to
+Claridge Pasha in Egypt.  As a neighbour, as Minister in the Government,
+I will do what I can to aid him."
+
+Silent and embarrassed, the old man tried to find his way.  Presently he
+said tentatively: "David Claridge has a title to the esteem of all
+civilised people."  Eglington was quick with his reply.  "If he succeeds,
+his title will become a concrete fact.  There is no honour the Crown
+would not confer for such remarkable service."
+
+The other's face darkened.  "I did not speak, I did not think, of handles
+to his name.  I find no good in them, but only means for deceiving and
+deluding the world.  Such honours as might make him baronet, or duke,
+would add not a cubit to his stature.  If he had such a thing by right"
+--his voice hardened, his eyes grew angry once again--"I would wish it
+sunk into the sea."
+
+"You are hard on us, sir, who did not give ourselves our titles, but took
+them with our birth as a matter of course.  There was nothing inspiring
+in them.  We became at once distinguished and respectable by patent."
+
+He laughed good-humouredly.  Then suddenly he changed, and his eyes took
+on a far-off look which Faith had seen so often in the eyes of David,
+but in David's more intense and meaning, and so different.  With what
+deftness and diplomacy had he worked upon her father!  He had crossed a
+stream which seemed impassable by adroit, insincere diplomacy.
+
+She saw that it was time to go, while yet Eglington's disparagement of
+rank and aristocracy was ringing in the old man's ears; though she knew
+there was nothing in Eglington's equipment he valued more than his title
+and the place it gave him.  Grateful, however, for his successful
+intervention, Faith now held out her hand.
+
+"I must take my father away, or it will be sunset before we reach the
+Meeting-house," she said.  "Goodbye-friend," she added gently.
+
+For an instant Luke Claridge stared at her, scarce comprehending that his
+movements were being directed by any one save himself.  Truth was, Faith
+had come to her cross-roads in life.  For the first time in her memory
+she had seen her father speak to an Eglington without harshness; and, as
+he weakened for a moment, she moved to take command of that weakness,
+though she meant it to seem like leading.  While loving her and David
+profoundly, her father had ever been quietly imperious.  If she could but
+gain ascendency even in a little, it might lead to a more open book of
+life for them both.
+
+Eglington held out his hand to the old man.  "I have kept you too long,
+sir.  Good-bye--if you will."
+
+The offered hand was not taken, but Faith slid hers into the old man's
+palm, and pressed it, and he said quietly to Eglington:
+
+"Good evening, friend."
+
+"And when I bring my wife, sir?" Eglington added, with a smile.
+
+"When thee brings the lady, there will be occasion to consider--there
+will be occasion then."
+
+Eglington raised his hat, and turned back upon the path he and Faith had
+travelled.
+
+The old man stood watching him until he was out of view.  Then he seemed
+more himself.  Still holding Faith's hand, he walked with her on the
+gorse-covered hill towards the graveyard.
+
+"Was it his heart spoke or his tongue--is there any truth in him?" he
+asked at last.
+
+Faith pressed his hand.  "If he help Davy, father--"
+
+"If he help Davy; ay, if he help Davy!  Nay, I cannot go to the
+graveyard, Faith.  Take me home," he said with emotion.
+
+His hand remained in hers.  She had conquered.  She was set upon a new
+path of influence.  Her hand was upon the door of his heart.
+
+"Thee is good to me, Faith," he said, as they entered the door of the Red
+Mansion.
+
+She glanced over towards the Cloistered House.  Smoke was coming from the
+little chimney of the laboratory.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+THE WOMAN OF THE CROSS-ROADS
+
+The night came down slowly.  There was no moon, the stars were few, but a
+mellow warmth was in the air.  At the window of her little sitting-room
+up-stairs Faith sat looking out into the stillness.  Beneath was the
+garden with its profusion of flowers and fruit; away to the left was the
+common; and beyond-far beyond--was a glow in the sky, a suffused light,
+of a delicate orange, merging away into a grey-blueness, deepening into
+a darker blue; and then a purple depth, palpable and heavy with a
+comforting silence.
+
+There was something alluring and suggestive in the soft, smothered
+radiance.  It had all the glamour of some distant place of pleasure and
+quiet joy, of happiness and ethereal being.  It was, in fact, the far-off
+mirror of the flaming furnace of the great Heddington factories.  The
+light of the sky above was a soft radiance, as of a happy Arcadian land;
+the fire of the toil beneath was the output of human striving, an
+intricate interweaving of vital forces which, like some Titanic machine,
+wrought out in pain--a vast destiny.
+
+As Faith looked, she thought of the thousands beneath struggling and
+striving, none with all desires satisfied, some in an agony of want and
+penury, all straining for the elusive Enough; like Sisyphus ever rolling
+the rock of labour up a hill too steep for them.
+
+Her mind flew to the man Kimber and his task of organising labour for its
+own advance.  What a life-work for a man!  Here might David have spent
+his days, here among his own countrymen, instead of in that far-off land
+where all the forces of centuries were fighting against him.  Here the
+forces would have been fighting for him; the trend was towards the
+elevation of the standards of living and the wider rights of labour,
+to the amelioration of hard conditions of life among the poor.  David's
+mind, with its equity, its balance, and its fire--what might it not have
+accomplished in shepherding such a cause, guiding its activity?
+
+The gate of the garden clicked.  Kate Heaver had arrived.  Faith got to
+her feet and left the room.
+
+A few minutes later the woman of the cross-roads was seated opposite
+Faith at the window.  She had changed greatly since the day David had
+sent her on her way to London and into the unknown.  Then there had been
+recklessness, something of coarseness, in the fine face.  Now it was
+strong and quiet, marked by purpose and self-reliance.
+
+Ignorance had been her only peril in the past, as it had been the cause
+of her unhappy connection with Jasper Kimber.  The atmosphere in which
+she was raised had been unmoral; it had not been consciously immoral.
+Her temper and her indignation against her man for drinking had been the
+means of driving them apart.  He would have married her in those days, if
+she had given the word, for her will was stronger than his own; but she
+had broken from him in an agony of rage and regret and despised love.
+
+She was now, again, as she had been in those first days before she went
+with Jasper Kimber; when she was the rose-red angel of the quarters; when
+children were lured by the touch of her large, shapely hands; when she
+had been counted a great nurse among her neighbours.  The old simple
+untutored sympathy was in her face.
+
+They sat for a long time in silence, and at length Faith said: "Thee is
+happy now with her who is to marry Lord Eglington?"
+
+Kate nodded, smiling.  "Who could help but be happy with her!  Yet a
+temper, too--so quick, and then all over in a second.  Ah, she is one
+that'd break her heart if she was treated bad; but I'd be sorry for him
+that did it.  For the like of her goes mad with hurting, and the mad cut
+with a big scythe."
+
+"Has thee seen Lord Eglington?"
+
+"Once before I left these parts and often in London."  Her voice was
+constrained; she seemed not to wish to speak of him.
+
+"Is it true that Jasper Kimber is to stand against him for Parliament?"
+
+"I do not know.  They say my lord has to do with foreign lands now.  If
+he helps Mr. Claridge there, then it would be a foolish thing for Jasper
+to fight him; and so I've told him.  You've got to stand by those that
+stand by you.  Lord Eglington has his own way of doing things.  There's
+not a servant in my lady's house that he hasn't made his friend.  He's
+one that's bound to have his will.  I heard my lady say he talks better
+than any one in England, and there's none she doesn't know from duchesses
+down."
+
+"She is beautiful?" asked Faith, with hesitation.
+
+"Taller than you, but not so beautiful."
+
+Faith sighed, and was silent for a moment, then she laid a hand upon the
+other's shoulder.  "Thee has never said what happened when thee first got
+to London.  Does thee care to say?"
+
+"It seems so long ago," was the reply.  .  .  .  "No need to tell of the
+journey to London.  When I got there it frightened me at first.  My head
+went round.  But somehow it came to me what I should do.  I asked my way
+to a hospital.  I'd helped a many that was hurt at Heddington and
+thereabouts, and doctors said I was as good as them that was trained.
+I found a hospital at last, and asked for work, but they laughed at me--
+it was the porter at the door.  I was not to be put down, and asked to
+see some one that had rights to say yes or no.  So he opened the door and
+told me to go.  I said he was no man to treat a woman so, and I would not
+go.  Then a fine white-haired gentleman came forward.  He had heard all
+we had said, standing in a little room at one side.  He spoke a kind word
+or two, and asked me to go into the little room.  Before I had time to
+think, he came to me with the matron, and left me with her.  I told her
+the whole truth, and she looked at first as if she'd turn me out.  But
+the end of it was I stayed there for the night, and in the morning the
+old gentleman came again, and with him his lady, as kind and sharp of
+tongue as himself, and as big as three.  Some things she said made my
+tongue ache to speak back to her; but I choked it down.  I went to her to
+be a sort of nurse and maid.  She taught me how to do a hundred things,
+and by-and-by I couldn't be too thankful she had taken me in.  I was with
+her till she died.  Then, six months ago I went to Miss Maryon, who knew
+about me long before from her that died.  With her I've been ever since--
+and so that's all."
+
+"Surely God has been kind to thee."
+
+"I'd have gone down--down--down, if it hadn't been for Mr. Claridge at
+the cross-roads."
+
+"Does thee think I shall like her that will live yonder?"  She nodded
+towards the Cloistered House.  "There's none but likes her.  She will
+want a friend, I'm thinking.  She'll be lonely by-and-by.  Surely, she
+will be lonely."
+
+Faith looked at her closely, and at last leaned over, and again laid a
+soft hand on her shoulder.  "Thee thinks that--why?"
+
+"He cares only what matters to himself.  She will be naught to him but
+one that belongs.  He'll never try to do her good.  Doing good to any but
+himself never comes to his mind."
+
+"How does thee know him, to speak so surely?"
+
+"When, at the first, he gave me a letter for her one day, and slipped a
+sovereign into my hand, and nodded, and smiled at me, I knew him right
+enough.  He never could be true to aught."
+
+"Did thee keep the sovereign?" Faith asked anxiously.
+
+"Ay, that I did.  If he was for giving his money away, I'd take it fast
+enough.  The gold gave father boots for a year.  Why should I mind?"
+
+Faith's face suffused.  How low was Eglington's estimate of humanity!
+
+In the silence that followed the door of her room opened, and her father
+entered.  He held in one hand a paper, in the other a candle.  His face
+was passive, but his eyes were burning.
+
+"David--David is coming," he cried, in a voice that rang.  "Does thee
+hear, Faith?  Davy is coming home!"  A woman laughed exultantly.  It was
+not Faith.  But still two years passed before David came.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+TIME, THE IDOL-BREAKER
+
+Lord Windlehurst looked meditatively round the crowded and brilliant
+salon.  His host, the Foreign Minister, had gathered in the vast golden
+chamber the most notable people of a most notable season, and in as
+critical a period of the world's politics as had been known for a quarter
+of a century.  After a moment's survey, the ex-Prime-Minister turned to
+answer the frank and caustic words addressed to him by the Duchess of
+Snowdon concerning the Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs.  Presently he
+said:
+
+"But there is method in his haste, dear lady.  He is good at his
+dangerous game.  He plays high, he plunges; but, somehow, he makes it do.
+I've been in Parliament a generation or so, and I've never known an
+amateur more daring and skilful.  I should have given him office had I
+remained in power.  Look at him, and tell me if he wouldn't have been
+worth the backing."
+
+As Lord Windlehurst uttered the last word with an arid smile, he looked
+quizzically at the central figure of a group of people gaily talking.
+
+The Duchess impatiently tapped her knee with a fan.  "Be thankful you
+haven't got him on your conscience," she rejoined.  "I call Eglington
+unscrupulous and unreliable.  He has but one god--getting on; and he has
+got on, with a vengeance.  Whenever I look at that dear thing he's
+married, I feel there's no trusting Providence, who seems to make the
+deserving a footstool for the undeserving.  I've known Hylda since she
+was ten, and I've known him since the minute he came into the world, and
+I've got the measure of both.  She is the finest essence the middle class
+can distil, and he, oh, he's paraffin-vin ordinaire, if you like it
+better, a selfish, calculating adventurer!"
+
+Lord Windlehurst chuckled mordantly.  "Adventurer!  That's what they
+called me--with more reason.  I spotted him as soon as he spoke in the
+House.  There was devilry in him, and unscrupulousness, as you say; but,
+I confess, I thought it would give way to the more profitable habit of
+integrity, and that some cause would seize him, make him sincere and
+mistaken, and give him a few falls.  But in that he was more original
+than I thought.  He is superior to convictions.  You don't think he
+married yonder Queen of Hearts from conviction, do you?"
+
+He nodded towards a corner where Hylda, under a great palm, and backed by
+a bank of flowers, stood surrounded by a group of people palpably amused
+and interested; for she had a reputation for wit--a wit that never hurt,
+and irony that was only whimsical.
+
+"No, there you are wrong," the Duchess answered.  "He married from
+conviction, if ever a man did.  Look at her beauty, look at her fortune,
+listen to her tongue.  Don't you think conviction was easy?"
+
+Lord Windlehurst looked at Hylda approvingly.  She has the real gift--
+little information, but much knowledge, the primary gift of public life.
+Information is full of traps; knowledge avoids them, it reads men; and
+politics is men--and foreign affairs, perhaps!  She is remarkable.  I've
+made some hay in the political world, not so much as the babblers think,
+but I hadn't her ability at twenty-five."
+
+"Why didn't she see through Eglington?"
+
+"My dear Betty, he didn't give her time.  He carried her off her feet.
+You know how he can talk."
+
+"That's the trouble.  She was clever, and liked a clever man, and he--!"
+
+"Quite so.  He'd disprove his own honest parentage, if it would help him
+on--as you say."
+
+"I didn't say it.  Now don't repeat that as from me.  I'm not clever
+enough to think of such things.  But that Eglington lot--I knew his
+father and his grandfather.  Old Broadbrim they called his grandfather
+after he turned Quaker, and he didn't do that till he had had his fling,
+so my father used to say.  And Old Broadbrim's father was called I-want-
+to-know.  He was always poking his nose into things, and playing at being
+a chemist-like this one and the one before.  They all fly off.  This
+one's father used to disappear for two or three years at a time.  This
+one will fly off, too.  You'll see!
+
+"He is too keen on Number One for that, I fancy.  He calculates like a
+mathematician.  As cool as a cracksman of fame and fancy."
+
+The Duchess dropped the fan in her lap.  "My dear, I've said nothing as
+bad as that about him.  And there he is at the Foreign Office!"
+
+"Yet, what has he done, Betty, after all?  He has never cheated at cards,
+or forged a cheque, or run away with his neighbour's wife."
+
+"There's no credit in not doing what you don't want to do.  There's no
+virtue in not falling, when you're not tempted.  Neighbour's wife!  He
+hasn't enough feeling to face it.  Oh no, he'll not break the heart of
+his neighbour's wife.  That's melodrama, and he's a cold-blooded artist.
+He will torture that sweet child over there until she poisons him, or
+runs away."
+
+"Isn't he too clever for that?  She has a million!"
+
+"He'll not realise it till it's all over.  He's too selfish to see--how I
+hate him!"
+
+Lord Windlehurst smiled indulgently at her.  "Ah, you never hated any
+one--not even the Duke."
+
+"I will not have you take away my character.  Of course I've hated, or I
+wouldn't be worth a button.  I'm not the silly thing you've always
+thought me."
+
+His face became gentler.  "I've always thought you one of the wisest
+women of this world--adventurous, but wise.  If it weren't too late, if
+my day weren't over, I'd ask the one great favour, Betty, and--"
+
+She tapped his arm sharply with her fan.  "What a humbug you are--the
+Great Pretender!  But tell me, am I not right about Eglington?"
+
+Windlehurst became grave.  "Yes, you are right--but I admire him, too.
+He is determined to test himself to the full.  His ambition is boundless
+and ruthless, but his mind has a scientific turn--the obligation of
+energy to apply itself, of intelligence to engage itself to the farthest
+limit.  But service to humanity--"
+
+"Service to humanity!" she sniffed.
+
+"Of course he would think it 'flap-doodle'--except in a speech; but
+I repeat, I admire him.  Think of it all.  He was a poor Irish peer,
+with no wide circle of acquaintance, come of a family none too popular.
+He strikes out a course for himself--a course which had its dangers,
+because it was original.  He determines to become celebrated--by becoming
+notorious first.  He uses his title as a weapon for advancement as though
+he were a butter merchant.  He plans carefully and adroitly.  He writes
+a book of travel.  It is impudent, and it traverses the observations of
+authorities, and the scientific geographers prance with rage.  That was
+what he wished.  He writes a novel.  It sets London laughing at me, his
+political chief.  He knew me well enough to be sure I would not resent
+it.  He would have lampooned his grandmother, if he was sure she would
+not, or could not, hurt him.  Then he becomes more audacious.  He
+publishes a monograph on the painters of Spain, artificial, confident,
+rhetorical, acute: as fascinating as a hide-and-seek drawing-room play--
+he is so cleverly escaping from his ignorance and indiscretions all the
+while.  Connoisseurs laugh, students of art shriek a little, and Ruskin
+writes a scathing letter, which was what he had played for.  He had got
+something for nothing cheaply.  The few who knew and despised him did not
+matter, for they were able and learned and obscure, and, in the world
+where he moves, most people are superficial, mediocre, and 'tuppence
+coloured.' It was all very brilliant.  He pursued his notoriety, and got
+it."
+
+"Industrious Eglington!"
+
+"But, yes, he is industrious.  It is all business.  It was an enormous
+risk, rebelling against his party, and leaving me, and going over; but
+his temerity justified itself, and it didn't matter to him that people
+said he went over to get office as we were going out.  He got the office-
+and people forget so soon.  Then, what does he do--"
+
+"He brings out another book, and marries a wife, and abuses his old
+friends--and you."
+
+"Abuse?  With his tongue in his cheek, hoping that I should reply.
+Dev'lishly ingenious!  But on that book of Electricity and Disease he
+scored.  In most other things he's a barber-shop philosopher, but in
+science he has got a flare, a real talent.  So he moves modestly in this
+thing, for which he had a fine natural gift and more knowledge than he
+ever had before in any department, whose boundaries his impertinent and
+ignorant mind had invaded.  That book gave him a place.  It wasn't full
+of new things, but it crystallised the discoveries, suggestions, and
+expectations of others; and, meanwhile, he had got a name at no cost.  He
+is so various.  Look at it dispassionately, and you will see much to
+admire in his skill.  He pleases, he amuses, he startles, he baffles, he
+mystifies."
+
+The Duchess made an impatient exclamation.  "The silly newspapers call
+him a 'remarkable man, a personality.' Now, believe me, Windlehurst, he
+will overreach himself one of these days, and he'll come down like a
+stick."
+
+"There you are on solid ground.  He thinks that Fate is with him, and
+that, in taking risks, he is infallible.  But the best system breaks at
+political roulette sooner or later.  You have got to work for something
+outside yourself, something that is bigger than the game, or the end is
+sickening."
+
+"Eglington hasn't far to go, if that's the truth."
+
+"Well, well, when it comes, we must help him--we must help him up again."
+
+The Duchess nervously adjusted her wig, with ludicrously tiny fingers for
+one so ample, and said petulantly: "You are incomprehensible.  He has
+been a traitor to you and to your party, he has thrown mud at you, he has
+played with principles as my terrier plays with his rubber ball, and yet
+you'll run and pick him up when he falls, and--"
+
+"'And kiss the spot to make it well,'" he laughed softly, then added with
+a sigh: "Able men in public life are few; 'far too few, for half our
+tasks; we can spare not one.'  Besides, my dear Betty, there is his
+pretty lass o' London."
+
+The Duchess was mollified at once.  "I wish she had been my girl," she
+said, in a voice a little tremulous.  "She never needed looking after.
+Look at the position she has made for herself.  Her father wouldn't go
+into society, her mother knew a mere handful of people, and--"
+
+"She knew you, Betty."
+
+"Well, suppose I did help her a little--I was only a kind of reference.
+She did the rest.  She's set a half-dozen fashions herself--pure genius.
+She was born to lead.  Her turnouts were always a little smarter, her
+horses travelled a little faster, than other people's.  She took risks,
+too, but she didn't play a game; she only wanted to do things well.  We
+all gasped when she brought Adelaide to recite from 'Romeo and Juliet' at
+an evening party, but all London did the same the week after."
+
+"She discovered, and the Duchess of Snowdon applied the science.
+Ah, Betty, don't think I don't agree.  She has the gift.  She has
+temperament.  No woman should have temperament.  She hasn't scope enough
+to wear it out in some passion for a cause.  Men are saved in spite of
+themselves by the law of work.  Forty comes to a man of temperament,
+and then a passion for a cause seizes him, and he is safe.  A woman of
+temperament at forty is apt to cut across the bows of iron-clad
+convention and go down.  She has temperament, has my lady yonder, and I
+don't like the look of her eyes sometimes.  There's dark fire smouldering
+in them.  She should have a cause; but a cause to a woman now-a-days
+means 'too little of pleasure, too much of pain,' for others."
+
+"What was your real cause, Windlehurst?  You had one, I suppose, for
+you've never had a fall."
+
+"My cause?  You ask that?  Behold the barren figtree!  A lifetime in my
+country's service, and you who have driven me home from the House in your
+own brougham, and told me that you understood--oh, Betty!"
+
+She laughed.  "You'll say something funny as you're dying, Windlehurst."
+
+"Perhaps.  But it will be funny to know that presently I'll have a secret
+that none of you know, who watch me 'launch my pinnace into the dark.'
+But causes?  There are hundreds, and all worth while.  I've come here
+to-night for a cause--no, don't start, it's not you, Betty, though you
+are worth any sacrifice.  I've come here to-night to see a modern
+Paladin, a real crusader:
+
+"'Then felt I like some watcher of the skies, When a new planet swims
+into his ken.'"
+
+"Yes, that's poetry, Windlehurst, and you know I love it-I've always kept
+yours.  But who's the man--the planet?"
+
+"Egyptian Claridge."
+
+"Ah, he is in England?"
+
+"He will be here to-night; you shall see him."
+
+"Really!  What is his origin?"
+
+He told her briefly, adding: "I've watched the rise of Claridge Pasha.
+I've watched his cause grow, and now I shall see the man--ah, but here
+comes our lass o' London!"
+
+The eyes of both brightened, and a whimsical pleasure came to the mask-
+like face of Lord Windlehurst.  There was an eager and delighted look in
+Hylda's face also as she quickly came to them, her cavaliers following.
+
+The five years that had passed since that tragic night in Cairo had been
+more than kind to her.  She was lissome, radiant, and dignified, her face
+was alive with expression, and a delicate grace was in every movement.
+The dark lashes seemed to have grown longer, the brown hair fuller, the
+smile softer and more alluring.
+
+"She is an invaluable asset to the Government," Lord Windlehurst murmured
+as she came.  "No wonder the party helped the marriage on.  London
+conspired for it, her feet got tangled in the web--and he gave her no
+time to think.  Thinking had saved her till he came."
+
+By instinct Lord Windlehurst knew.  During the first year after the
+catastrophe at Kaid's Palace Hylda could scarcely endure the advances
+made by her many admirers, the greatly eligible and the eager ineligible,
+all with as real an appreciation of her wealth as of her personal
+attributes.  But she took her place in London life with more than the
+old will to make for herself, with the help of her aunt Conyngham,
+an individual position.
+
+The second year after her visit to Egypt she was less haunted by the dark
+episode of the Palace, memory tortured her less; she came to think of
+David and the part he had played with less agitation.  At first the
+thought of him had moved her alternately to sympathy and to revolt.
+His chivalry had filled her with admiration, with a sense of confidence,
+of dependence, of touching and vital obligation; but there was, too,
+another overmastering feeling.  He had seen her life naked, as it were,
+stripped of all independence, with the knowledge of a dangerous
+indiscretion which, to say the least, was a deformity; and she inwardly
+resented it, as one would resent the exposure of a long-hidden physical
+deformity, even by the surgeon who saved one's life.  It was not a very
+lofty attitude of mind, but it was human--and feminine.
+
+These moods had been always dissipated, however, when she recalled,
+as she did so often, David as he stood before Nahoum Pasha, his soul
+fighting in him to make of his enemy--of the man whose brother he had
+killed--a fellow-worker in the path of altruism he had mapped out for
+himself.  David's name had been continually mentioned in telegraphic
+reports and journalistic correspondence from Egypt; and from this source
+she had learned that Nahoum Pasha was again high in the service of Prince
+Kaid.  When the news of David's southern expedition to the revolting
+slave-dealing tribes began to appear, she was deeply roused.  Her
+agitation was the more intense because she never permitted herself to
+talk of him to others, even when his name was discussed at dinner-tables,
+accompanied by strange legends of his origin and stranger romances
+regarding his call to power by Kaid.
+
+She had surrounded him with romance; he seemed more a hero of history
+than of her own real and living world, a being apart.  Even when there
+came rumblings of disaster, dark dangers to be conquered by the Quaker
+crusader, it all was still as of another life.  True it was, that when
+his safe return to Cairo was announced she had cried with joy and relief;
+but there was nothing emotional or passionate in her feeling; it was the
+love of the lower for the higher, the hero-worship of an idealist in
+passionate gratitude.
+
+And, amid it all, her mind scarcely realised that they would surely meet
+again.  At the end of the second year the thought had receded into an
+almost indefinite past.  She was beginning to feel that she had lived
+two lives, and that this life had no direct or vital bearing upon her
+previous existence, in which David had moved.  Yet now and then the
+perfume of the Egyptian garden, through which she had fled to escape from
+tragedy, swept over her senses, clouded her eyes in the daytime, made
+them burn at night.
+
+At last she had come to meet and know Eglington.  From the first moment
+they met he had directed his course towards marriage.  He was the man of
+the moment.  His ambition seemed but patriotism, his ardent and
+overwhelming courtship the impulse of a powerful nature.  As Lord
+Windlehurst had said, he carried her off her feet, and, on a wave of
+devotion and popular encouragement, he had swept her to the altar,
+
+The Duchess held both her hands for a moment, admiring her, and,
+presently, with a playful remark upon her unselfishness, left her alone
+with Lord Windlehurst.
+
+As they talked, his mask-like face became lighted from the brilliant fire
+in the inquisitorial eyes, his lips played with topics of the moment in a
+mordant fashion, which drew from her flashing replies.  Looking at her,
+he was conscious of the mingled qualities of three races in her--English,
+Welsh, and American-Dutch of the Knickerbocker strain; and he contrasted
+her keen perception and her exquisite sensitiveness with the purebred
+Englishwomen round him, stately, kindly, handsome, and monotonously
+intelligent.
+
+"Now I often wonder," he said, conscious of, but indifferent to, the
+knowledge that he and the brilliant person beside him were objects of
+general attention--"I often wonder, when I look at a gathering like this,
+how many undiscovered crimes there are playing about among us.  They
+never do tell--or shall I say, we never do tell?"
+
+All day, she knew not why, Hylda had been nervous and excited.  Without
+reason his words startled her.  Now there flashed before her eyes a room
+in a Palace at Cairo, and a man lying dead before her.  The light slowly
+faded out of her eyes, leaving them almost lustreless, but her face was
+calm, and the smile on her lips stayed.  She fanned herself slowly, and
+answered nonchalantly: "Crime is a word of many meanings.  I read in the
+papers of political crimes--it is a common phrase; yet the criminals
+appear to go unpunished."
+
+"There you are wrong," he answered cynically.  "The punishment is, that
+political virtue goes unrewarded, and in due course crime is the only
+refuge to most.  Yet in politics the temptation to be virtuous is great."
+
+She laughed now with a sense of relief.  The intellectual stimulant
+had brought back the light to her face.  "How is it, then, with you--
+inveterate habit or the strain of the ages?  For they say you have not
+had your due reward."
+
+He smiled grimly.  "Ah, no, with me virtue is the act of an inquiring
+mind--to discover where it will lead me.  I began with political crime--
+I was understood!  I practise political virtue: it embarrasses the world,
+it fogs them, it seems original, because so unnecessary.  Mine is the
+scientific life.  Experiment in old substances gives new--well, say, new
+precipitations.  But you are scientific, too.  You have a laboratory, and
+have much to do--with retorts."
+
+"No, you are thinking of my husband.  The laboratory is his."
+
+"But the retorts are yours."
+
+"The precipitations are his."
+
+"Ah, well, at least you help him to fuse the constituents!  .  .  .  But
+now, be quite confidential to an old man who has experimented too.  Is
+your husband really an amateur scientist, or is he a scientific amateur?
+Is it a pose or a taste?  I fiddled once--and wrote sonnets; one was a
+pose, the other a taste."
+
+It was mere persiflage, but it was a jest which made an unintended wound.
+Hylda became conscious of a sudden sharp inquiry going on in her mind.
+There flashed into it the question, Does Eglington's heart ever really
+throb for love of any object or any cause?  Even in moments of greatest
+intimacy, soon after marriage, when he was most demonstrative towards
+her, he had seemed preoccupied, except when speaking about himself and
+what he meant to do.  Then he made her heart throb in response to his
+confident, ardent words--concerning himself.  But his own heart, did it
+throb?  Or was it only his brain that throbbed?
+
+Suddenly, with an exclamation, she involuntarily laid a hand upon
+Windlehurst's arm.  She was looking down the room straight before her to
+a group of people towards which other groups were now converging,
+attracted by one who seemed to be a centre of interest.
+
+Presently the eager onlookers drew aside, and Lord Windlehurst observed
+moving up the room a figure he had never seen before.  The new-comer was
+dressed in a grey and blue official dress, unrelieved save by silver
+braid at the collar and at the wrists.  There was no decoration, but on
+the head was a red fez, which gave prominence to the white, broad
+forehead, with the dark hair waving away behind the ears.  Lord
+Windlehurst held his eye-glass to his eye in interested scrutiny.  "H'm,"
+he said, with lips pursed out, "a most notable figure, a most remarkable
+face!  My dear, there's a fortune in that face.  It's a national asset."
+
+He saw the flush, the dumb amazement, the poignant look in Lady
+Eglington's face, and registered it in his mind.  "Poor thing," he said
+to himself, "I wonder what it is all about--I wonder.  I thought she had
+no unregulated moments.  She gave promise of better things."  The Foreign
+Minister was bringing his guest towards them.  The new-comer did not look
+at them till within a few steps of where they stood.  Then his eyes met
+those of Lady Eglington.  For an instant his steps were arrested.  A
+swift light came into his face, softening its quiet austerity and
+strength.
+
+It was David.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+SHARPER THAN A SWORD
+
+A glance of the eye was the only sign of recognition between David and
+Hylda; nothing that others saw could have suggested that they had ever
+met before.  Lord Windlehurst at once engaged David in conversation.
+
+At first when Hylda had come back from Egypt, those five years ago, she
+had often wondered what she would think or do if she ever were to see
+this man again; whether, indeed, she could bear it.  Well, the moment and
+the man had come.  Her eyes had gone blind for an instant; it had seemed
+for one sharp, crucial moment as though she could not bear it; then the
+gulf of agitation was passed, and she had herself in hand.
+
+While her mind was engaged subconsciously with what Lord Windlehurst and
+David said, comprehending it all, and, when Lord Windlehurst appealed to
+her, offering by a word contribution to the 'pourparler', she was
+studying David as steadily as her heated senses would permit her.
+
+He seemed to her to have put on twenty years in the steady force of his
+personality--in the composure of his bearing, in the self-reliance of his
+look, though his face and form were singularly youthful.  The face was
+handsome and alight, the look was that of one who weighed things; yet she
+was conscious of a great change.  The old delicate quality of the
+features was not so marked, though there was nothing material in the
+look, and the head had not a sordid line, while the hand that he now and
+again raised, brushing his forehead meditatively, had gained much in
+strength and force.  Yet there was something--something different, that
+brought a slight cloud into her eyes.  It came to her now, a certain
+melancholy in the bearing of the figure, erect and well-balanced as it
+was.  Once the feeling came, the certainty grew.  And presently she found
+a strange sadness in the eyes, something that lurked behind all that he
+did and all that he was, some shadow over the spirit.  It was even more
+apparent when he smiled.
+
+As she was conscious of this new reading of him, a motion arrested her
+glance, a quick lifting of the head to one side, as though the mind had
+suddenly been struck by an idea, the glance flying upward in abstracted
+questioning.  This she had seen in her husband, too, the same brisk
+lifting of the head, the same quick smiling.  Yet this face, unlike
+Eglington's, expressed a perfect single-mindedness; it wore the look of a
+self-effacing man of luminous force, a concentrated battery of energy.
+Since she had last seen him every sign of the provincial had vanished.
+He was now the well-modulated man of affairs, elegant in his simplicity
+of dress, with the dignified air of the intellectual, yet with the
+decision of a man who knew his mind.
+
+Lord Windlehurst was leaving.  Now David and she were alone.  Without a
+word they moved on together through the throng, the eyes of all following
+them, until they reached a quiet room at one end of the salon, where were
+only a few people watching the crowd pass the doorway.
+
+"You will be glad to sit," he said, motioning her to a chair beside some
+palms.  Then, with a change of tone, he added: "Thee is not sorry I am
+come?"
+
+Thee--the old-fashioned simple Quaker word!  She put her fingers to her
+eyes.  Her senses were swimming with a distant memory.  The East was in
+her brain, the glow of the skies, the gleam of the desert, the swish of
+the Nile, the cry of the sweet-seller, the song of the dance-girl, the
+strain of the darabukkeh, the call of the skis.  She saw again the
+ghiassas drifting down the great river, laden with dourha; she saw the
+mosque of the blue tiles with its placid fountain, and its handful of
+worshippers praying by the olive-tree.  She watched the moon rise above
+the immobile Sphinx, she looked down on the banqueters in the Palace,
+David among them, and Foorgat Bey beside her.  She saw Foorgat Bey again
+lying dead at her feet.  She heard the stir of the leaves; she caught the
+smell of the lime-trees in the Palace garden as she fled.  She recalled
+her reckless return to Cairo from Alexandria.  She remembered the little
+room where she and David, Nahoum and Mizraim, crossed a bridge over a
+chasm, and stood upon ground which had held good till now--till this
+hour, when the man who had played a most vital part in her life had
+come again out of a land which, by some forced obliquity of mind and
+stubbornness of will, she had assured herself she would never see again.
+
+She withdrew her hand from her eyes, and saw him looking at her calmly,
+though his face was alight.  "Thee is fatigued," he said.  "This is
+labour which wears away the strength."  He made a motion towards the
+crowd.
+
+She smiled a very little, and said: "You do not care for such things as
+this, I know.  Your life has its share of it, however, I suppose."
+
+He looked out over the throng before he answered.  "It seems an eddy of
+purposeless waters.  Yet there is great depth beneath, or there were no
+eddy; and where there is depth and the eddy there is danger--always."
+As he spoke she became almost herself again.  "You think that deep
+natures have most perils?"
+
+"Thee knows it is so.  Human nature is like the earth: the deeper the
+plough goes into the soil unploughed before, the more evil substance is
+turned up--evil that becomes alive as soon as the sun and the air fall
+upon it."
+
+"Then, women like me who pursue a flippant life, who ride in this merry-
+go-round"--she made a gesture towards the crowd beyond--"who have no
+depth, we are safest, we live upon the surface."  Her gaiety was forced;
+her words were feigned.
+
+"Thee has passed the point of danger, thee is safe," he answered
+meaningly.
+
+"Is that because I am not deep, or because the plough has been at work?"
+she asked.  "In neither case I am not sure you are right."
+
+"Thee is happily married," he said reflectively; "and the prospect is
+fair."
+
+"I think you know my husband," she said in answer, and yet not in answer.
+
+"I was born in Hamley where he has a place--thee has been there?" he
+asked eagerly.
+
+"Not yet.  We are to go next Sunday, for the first time to the Cloistered
+House.  I had not heard that my husband knew you, until I saw in the
+paper a few days ago that your home was in Hamley.  Then I asked
+Eglington, and he told me that your family and his had been neighbours
+for generations."
+
+"His father was a Quaker," David rejoined, "but he forsook the faith."
+
+"I did not know," she answered, with some hesitation.  There was no
+reason why, when she and Eglington had talked of Hamley, he should not
+have said his own father had once been a Quaker; yet she had dwelt so
+upon the fact that she herself had Quaker blood, and he had laughed so
+much over it, with the amusement of the superior person, that his silence
+on this one point struck her now with a sense of confusion.
+
+"You are going to Hamley--we shall meet there?" she continued.
+
+"To-day I should have gone, but I have business at the Foreign Office
+to-morrow.  One needs time to learn that all 'private interests and
+partial affections' must be sacrificed to public duty."
+
+"But you are going soon?  You will be there on Sunday?"
+
+"I shall be there to-morrow night, and Sunday, and for one long week at
+least.  Hamley is the centre of the world, the axle of the universe--you
+shall see.  You doubt it?" he added, with a whimsical smile.
+
+"I shall dispute most of what you say, and all that you think, if you do
+not continue to use the Quaker 'thee' and 'thou'--ungrammatical as you
+are so often."
+
+"Thee is now the only person in London, or in England, with whom I use
+'thee' and 'thou.'  I am no longer my own master, I am a public servant,
+and so I must follow custom."
+
+"It is destructive of personality.  The 'thee' and 'thou' belong to you.
+I wonder if the people of Hamley will say 'thee' and 'thou' to me.  I
+hope, I do hope they will."
+
+"Thee may be sure they will.  They are no respecters of persons there.
+They called your husband's father Robert--his name was Robert.  Friend
+Robert they called him, and afterwards they called him Robert Denton till
+he died."
+
+"Will they call me Hylda?" she asked, with a smile.  "More like they
+will call thee Friend Hylda; it sounds simple and strong," he replied.
+
+"As they call Claridge Pasha Friend David," she answered, with a smile.
+"David is a good name for a strong man."
+
+"That David threw a stone from a sling and smote a giant in the forehead.
+The stone from this David's sling falls into the ocean and is lost
+beneath the surface."
+
+His voice had taken on a somewhat sombre tone, his eyes looked away into
+the distance; yet he smiled too, and a hand upon his knee suddenly closed
+in sympathy with an inward determination.
+
+A light of understanding came into her face.  They had been keeping
+things upon the surface, and, while it lasted, he seemed a lesser man
+than she had thought him these past years.  But now--now there was the
+old unschooled simplicity, the unique and lonely personality, the homely
+soul and body bending to one root-idea, losing themselves in a wave of
+duty.  Again he was to her, once more, the dreamer, the worker, the
+conqueror--the conqueror of her own imagination.  She had in herself the
+soul of altruism, the heart of the crusader.  Touched by the fire of a
+great idea, she was of those who could have gone out into the world
+without wallet or scrip, to work passionately for some great end.
+
+And she had married the Earl of Eglington!
+
+She leaned towards David, and said eagerly: "But you are satisfied--you
+are satisfied with your work for poor Egypt?"
+
+"Thee says 'poor Egypt,'" he answered, "and thee says well.  Even now she
+is not far from the day of Rameses and Joseph.  Thee thinks perhaps thee
+knows Egypt--none knows her."
+
+"You know her--now?"
+
+He shook his head slowly.  "It is like putting one's ear to the mouth of
+the Sphinx.  Yet sometimes, almost in despair, when I have lain down in
+the desert beside my camel, set about with enemies, I have got a message
+from the barren desert, the wide silence, and the stars."  He paused.
+
+"What is the message that comes?" she asked softly.  "It is always the
+same: Work on!  Seek not to know too much, nor think that what you do is
+of vast value.  Work, because it is yours to be adjusting the machinery
+in your own little workshop of life to the wide mechanism of the universe
+and time.  One wheel set right, one flying belt adjusted, and there is a
+step forward to the final harmony--ah, but how I preach!" he added
+hastily.
+
+His eyes were fixed on hers with a great sincerity, and they were clear
+and shining, yet his lips were smiling--what a trick they had of smiling!
+He looked as though he should apologise for such words in such a place.
+
+She rose to her feet with a great suspiration, with a light in her eyes
+and a trembling smile.
+
+"But no, no, no, you inspire one.  Thee inspires me," she said, with a
+little laugh, in which there was a note of sadness.  "I may use 'thee,'
+may I not, when I will?  I am a little a Quaker also, am I not?  My
+people came from Derbyshire, my American people, that is--and only forty
+years ago.  Almost thee persuades me to be a Quaker now," she added.
+"And perhaps I shall be, too," she went on, her eyes fixed on the crowd
+passing by, Eglington among them.
+
+David saw Eglington also, and moved forward with her.
+
+"We shall meet in Hamley," she said composedly, as she saw her husband
+leave the crush and come towards her.  As Eglington noticed David,
+a curious enigmatical glance flashed from his eyes.  He came forward,
+however, with outstretched hand.
+
+"I am sorry I was not at the Foreign Office when you called to-day.
+Welcome back to England, home--and beauty."  He laughed in a rather
+mirthless way, but with a certain empressement, conscious, as he always
+was, of the onlookers.  "You have had a busy time in Egypt?" he
+continued cheerfully, and laughed again.
+
+David laughed slightly, also, and Hylda noticed that it had a certain
+resemblance in its quick naturalness to that of her husband.
+
+"I am not sure that we are so busy there as we ought to be," David
+answered.  "I have no real standards.  I am but an amateur, and have
+known nothing of public life.  But you should come and see."
+
+"It has been in my mind.  An ounce of eyesight is worth a ton of print.
+My lady was there once, I believe"--he turned towards her--"but before
+your time, I think.  Or did you meet there, perhaps?"  He glanced at both
+curiously.  He scarcely knew why a thought flashed into his mind--as
+though by some telepathic sense; for it had never been there before,
+and there was no reason for its being there now.
+
+Hylda saw what David was about to answer, and she knew instinctively that
+he would say they had never met.  It shamed her.  She intervened as she
+saw he was about to speak.
+
+"We were introduced for the first time to-night," she said; "but Claridge
+Pasha is part of my education in the world.  It is a miracle that Hamley
+should produce two such men," she added gaily, and laid her fan upon her
+husband's arm lightly.  "You should have been a Quaker, Harry, and then
+you two would have been--"
+
+"Two Quaker Don Quixotes," interrupted Eglington ironically.
+
+"I should not have called you a Don Quixote," his wife lightly rejoined,
+relieved at the turn things had taken.  "I cannot imagine you tilting at
+wind-mills--"
+
+"Or saving maidens in distress?  Well, perhaps not; but you do not
+suggest that Claridge Pasha tilts at windmills either--or saves maidens
+in distress.  Though, now I come to think, there was an episode."  He
+laughed maliciously.  "Some time ago it was--a lass of the cross-roads.
+I think I heard of such an adventure, which did credit to Claridge
+Pasha's heart, though it shocked Hamley at the time.  But I wonder,
+was the maiden really saved?"
+
+Lady Eglington's face became rigid.  "Well, yes," she said slowly, "the
+maiden was saved.  She is now my maid.  Hamley may have been shocked, but
+Claridge Pasha has every reason to be glad that he helped a fellow-being
+in trouble."
+
+"Your maid--Heaver?" asked Eglington in surprise, a swift shadow
+crossing his face.
+
+"Yes; she only told me this morning.  Perhaps she had seen that Claridge
+Pasha was coming to England.  I had not, however.  At any rate, Quixotism
+saved her."
+
+David smiled.  "It is better than I dared to hope," he remarked quietly.
+
+"But that is not all," continued Hylda.  "There is more.  She had been
+used badly by a man who now wants to marry her--has tried to do so for
+years.  Now, be prepared for a surprise, for it concerns you rather
+closely, Eglington.  Fate is a whimsical jade.  Whom do you think it is?
+Well, since you could never guess, it was Jasper Kimber."
+
+Eglington's eyes opened wide.  "This is nothing but a coarse and
+impossible stage coincidence," he laughed.  "It is one of those tricks
+played by Fact to discredit the imagination.  Life is laughing at us
+again.  The longer I live, the more I am conscious of being an object of
+derision by the scene-shifters in the wings of the stage.  What a cynical
+comedy life is at the best!"
+
+"It all seems natural enough," rejoined David.
+
+"It is all paradox."
+
+"Isn't it all inevitable law?  I have no belief in 'antic Fate.'"
+
+Hylda realised, with a new and poignant understanding, the difference of
+outlook on life between the two men.  She suddenly remembered the words
+of Confucius, which she had set down in her little book of daily life:
+"By nature we approximate, it is only experience that drives us apart."
+
+David would have been content to live in the desert all his life for the
+sake of a cause, making no calculations as to reward.  Eglington must
+ever have the counters for the game.
+
+"Well, if you do not believe in 'antic Fate,' you must be greatly puzzled
+as you go on," he rejoined, laughing; "especially in Egypt, where the
+East and the West collide, race against race, religion against religion,
+Oriental mind against Occidental intellect.  You have an unusual quantity
+of Quaker composure, to see in it all 'inevitable law.'  And it must be
+dull.  But you always were, so they say in Hamley, a monument of
+seriousness."
+
+"I believe they made one or two exceptions," answered David drily.
+"I had assurances."
+
+Eglington laughed boyishly.  "You are right.  You achieved a name for
+humour in a day--'a glass, a kick, and a kiss,' it was.  Do you have such
+days in Egypt?"
+
+"You must come and see," David answered lightly, declining to notice the
+insolence.  "These are critical days there.  The problems are worthy of
+your care.  Will you not come?"
+
+Eglington was conscious of a peculiar persuasive influence over himself
+that he had never felt before.  In proportion, however, as he felt its
+compelling quality, there came a jealousy of the man who was its cause.
+The old antagonism, which had had its sharpest expression the last time
+they had met on the platform at Heddington, came back.  It was one strong
+will resenting another--as though there was not room enough in the wide
+world of being for these two atoms of life, sparks from the ceaseless
+wheel, one making a little brighter flash than the other for the moment,
+and then presently darkness, and the whirring wheel which threw them off,
+throwing off millions of others again.
+
+On the moment Eglington had a temptation to say something with an edge,
+which would show David that his success in Egypt hung upon the course
+that he himself and the weak Foreign Minister, under whom he served,
+would take.  And this course would be his own course largely, since he
+had been appointed to be a force and strength in the Foreign Office which
+his chief did not supply.  He refrained, however, and, on the moment,
+remembered the promise he had given to Faith to help David.
+
+A wave of feeling passed over him.  His wife was beautiful, a creature of
+various charms, a centre of attraction.  Yet he had never really loved
+her--so many sordid elements had entered into the thought of marriage
+with her, lowering the character of his affection.  With a perversity
+which only such men know, such heart as he had turned to the unknown
+Quaker girl who had rebuked him, scathed him, laid bare his soul before
+himself, as no one ever had done.  To Eglington it was a relief that
+there was one human being--he thought there was only one--who read him
+through and through; and that knowledge was in itself as powerful an
+influence as was the secret between David and Hylda.  It was a kind of
+confessional, comforting to a nature not self-contained.  Now he
+restrained his cynical intention to deal David a side-thrust,
+and quietly said:
+
+"We shall meet at Hamley, shall we not?  Let us talk there, and not at
+the Foreign Office.  You would care to go to Egypt, Hylda?"
+
+She forced a smile.  "Let us talk it over at Hamley."  With a smile to
+David she turned away to some friends.
+
+Eglington offered to introduce David to some notable people, but he said
+that he must go--he was fatigued after his journey.  He had no wish to be
+lionised.
+
+As he left the salon, the band was playing a tune that made him close his
+eyes, as though against something he would not see.  The band in Kaid's
+Palace had played it that night when he had killed Foorgat Bey.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+EACH AFTER HIS OWN ORDER
+
+With the passing years new feelings had grown up in the heart of Luke
+Claridge.  Once David's destiny and career were his own peculiar and
+self-assumed responsibility.  "Inwardly convicted," he had wrenched the
+lad away from the natural circumstances of his life, and created a scheme
+of existence for him out of his own conscience--a pious egoist.
+
+After David went to Egypt, however, his mind involuntarily formed the
+resolution that "Davy and God should work it out together."
+
+He had grown very old in appearance, and his quiet face was almost
+painfully white; but the eyes burned with more fire than in the past.
+As the day approached when David should arrive in England, he walked by
+himself continuously, oblivious of the world round him.  He spoke to no
+one, save the wizened Elder Meacham, and to John Fairley, who rightly
+felt that he had a share in the making of Claridge Pasha.
+
+With head perched in the air, and face half hidden in his great white
+collar, the wizened Elder, stopping Luke Claridge in the street one day,
+said:
+
+"Does thee think the lad will ride in Pharaoh's chariot here?"
+
+There were sly lines of humour about the mouth of the wizened Elder as he
+spoke, but Luke Claridge did not see.
+
+"Pride is far from his heart," he answered portentously.  "He will ride
+in no chariot.  He has written that he will walk here from Heddington,
+and none is to meet him."
+
+"He will come by the cross-roads, perhaps," rejoined the other piously.
+"Well, well, memory is a flower or a rod, as John Fox said, and the
+cross-roads have memories for him."
+
+Again flashes of humour crossed his face, for he had a wide humanity, of
+insufficient exercise.
+
+"He has made full atonement, and thee does ill to recall the past,
+Reuben," rejoined the other sternly.
+
+"If he has done no more that needs atonement than he did that day at the
+cross-roads, then has his history been worthy of Hamley," rejoined the
+wizened Elder, eyes shut and head buried in his collar.  "Hamley made
+him--Hamley made him.  We did not spare advice, or example, or any
+correction that came to our minds--indeed, it was almost a luxury.  Think
+you, does he still play the flute--an instrument none too grave, Luke?"
+
+But, to this, Luke Claridge exclaimed impatiently and hastened on; and
+the little wizened Elder chuckled to himself all the way to the house of
+John Fairley.  None in Hamley took such pride in David as did these two
+old men, who had loved him from a child, but had discreetly hidden their
+favour, save to each other.  Many times they had met and prayed together
+in the weeks when his life was in notorious danger in the Soudan.
+
+As David walked through the streets of Heddington making for the open
+country, he was conscious of a new feeling regarding the place.  It was
+familiar, but in a new sense.  Its grimy, narrow streets, unlovely
+houses, with shut windows, summer though it was, and no softening
+influences anywhere, save here and there a box of sickly geraniums in the
+windows, all struck his mind in a way they had never done before.  A mile
+away were the green fields, the woods, the roadsides gay with flowers and
+shrubs-loveliness was but over the wall, as it were; yet here the
+barrack-like houses, the grey, harsh streets, seemed like prison walls,
+and the people in them prisoners who, with every legal right to call
+themselves free, were as much captives as the criminal on some small
+island in a dangerous sea.  Escape--where?  Into the gulf of no work and
+degradation?
+
+They never lifted their eyes above the day's labour.  They were scarce
+conscious of anything beyond.  What were their pleasures?  They had
+imitations of pleasures.  To them a funeral or a wedding, a riot or a
+vociferous band, a dog-fight or a strike, were alike in this, that they
+quickened feelings which carried them out of themselves, gave them a
+sense of intoxication.
+
+Intoxication?  David remembered the far-off day of his own wild rebellion
+in Hamley.  From that day forward he had better realised that in the
+hearts of so many of the human race there was a passion to forget
+themselves; to blot out, if for a moment only, the troubles of life and
+time; or, by creating a false air of exaltation, to rise above them.
+Once in the desert, when men were dying round him of fever and dysentery,
+he had been obliged, exhausted and ill, scarce able to drag himself from
+his bed, to resort to an opiate to allay his own sufferings, that he
+might minister to others.  He remembered how, in the atmosphere it had
+created--an intoxication, a soothing exhilaration and pervasive thrill--
+he had saved so many of his followers.  Since then the temptation had
+come upon him often when trouble weighed or difficulties surrounded him
+--accompanied always by recurrence of fever--to resort to the insidious
+medicine.  Though he had fought the temptation with every inch of his
+strength, he could too well understand those who sought for "surcease of
+pain"
+
+                   "Seeking for surcease of pain,
+                    Pilgrim to Lethe I came;
+                    Drank not, for pride was too keen,
+                    Stung by the sound of a name!"
+
+As the plough of action had gone deep into his life and laid bare his
+nature to the light, there had been exposed things which struggled for
+life and power in him, with the fiery strength which only evil has.
+
+The western heavens were aglow.  On every hand the gorse and the may were
+in bloom, the lilacs were coming to their end, but wild rhododendrons
+were glowing in the bracken, as he stepped along the road towards the
+place where he was born.  Though every tree and roadmark was familiar,
+yet he was conscious of a new outlook.  He had left these quiet scenes
+inexperienced and untravelled, to be thrust suddenly into the thick of a
+struggle of nations over a sick land.  He had worked in a vortex of
+debilitating local intrigue.  All who had to do with Egypt gained except
+herself, and if she moved in revolt or agony, they threatened her.
+Once when resisting the pressure and the threats of war of a foreign
+diplomatist, he had, after a trying hour, written to Faith in a burst of
+passionate complaint, and his letter had ended with these words.
+
+                   "In your onward march, O men,
+                    White of face, in promise whiter,
+                    You unsheath the sword, and then
+                    Blame the wronged as the fighter.
+
+                   "Time, ah, Time, rolls onward o'er
+                    All these foetid fields of evil,
+                    While hard at the nation's core
+                    Eats the burning rust and weevill
+
+                   "Nathless, out beyond the stars
+                    Reigns the Wiser and the Stronger,
+                    Seeing in all strifes and wars
+                    Who the wronged, who the wronger."
+
+Privately he had spoken thus, but before the world he had given way to
+no impulse, in silence finding safety from the temptation to diplomatic
+evasion.  Looking back over five years, he felt now that the sum of his
+accomplishment had been small.
+
+He did not realise the truth.  When his hand was almost upon the object
+for which he had toiled and striven--whether pacifying a tribe, meeting a
+loan by honest means, building a barrage, irrigating the land, financing
+a new industry, or experimenting in cotton--it suddenly eluded him.
+Nahoum had snatched it away by subterranean wires.  On such occasions
+Nahoum would shrug his shoulders, and say with a sigh, "Ah, my friend,
+let us begin again.  We are both young; time is with us; and we will
+flourish palms in the face of Europe yet.  We have our course set by a
+bright star.  We will continue."
+
+Yet, withal, David was the true altruist.  Even now as he walked this
+road which led to his old home, dear to him beyond all else, his thoughts
+kept flying to the Nile and to the desert.
+
+Suddenly he stopped.  He was at the cross-roads.  Here he had met Kate
+Heaver, here he had shamed his neighbours--and begun his work in life.
+He stood for a moment, smiling, as he looked at the stone where he had
+sat those years ago, his hand feeling instinctively for his flute.
+Presently he turned to the dusty road again.
+
+Walking quickly away, he swung into the path of the wood which would
+bring him by a short cut to Hamley, past Soolsby's cottage.  Here was the
+old peace, the old joy of solitude among the healing trees.  Experience
+had broadened his life, had given him a vast theatre of work; but the
+smell of the woods, the touch of the turf, the whispering of the trees,
+the song of the birds, had the ancient entry to his heart.
+
+At last he emerged on the hill where Soolsby lived.  He had not meant, if
+he could help it, to speak to any one until he had entered the garden of
+the Red Mansion, but he had inadvertently come upon this place where he
+had spent the most momentous days of his life, and a feeling stronger
+than he cared to resist drew him to the open doorway.  The afternoon sun
+was beating in over the threshold as he reached it, and, at his footstep,
+a figure started forward from the shadow of a corner.
+
+It was Kate Heaver.
+
+Surprise, then pain showed in her face; she flushed, was agitated.
+
+"I am sorry.  It's too bad--it's hard on him you should see," she said in
+a breath, and turned her head away for an instant; but presently looked
+him in the face again, all trembling and eager.  "He'll be sorry enough
+to-morrow," she added solicitously, and drew away from something, she had
+been trying to hide.
+
+Then David saw.  On a bench against a wall lay old Soolsby--drunk.
+A cloud passed across his face and left it pale.
+
+"Of course," he said simply, and went over and touched the heaving
+shoulders reflectively.  "Poor Soolsby!"
+
+"He's been sober four years--over four," she said eagerly.  "When he knew
+you'd come again, he got wild, and he would have the drink in spite of
+all.  Walking from Heddington, I saw him at the tavern, and brought him
+home."
+
+"At the tavern--" David said reflectively.
+
+"The Fox and Goose, sir."  She turned her face away again, and David's
+head came up with a quick motion.  There it was, five years ago, that he
+had drunk at the bar, and had fought Jasper Kimber.
+
+"Poor fellow!" he said again, and listened to Soolsby's stertorous
+breathing, as a physician looks at a patient whose case he cannot
+control, does not wholly understand.
+
+The hand of the sleeping man was suddenly raised, his head gave a jerk,
+and he said mumblingly: "Claridge for ever!"
+
+Kate nervously intervened.  "It fair beat him, your coming back, sir.
+It's awful temptation, the drink.  I lived in it for years, and it's
+cruel hard to fight it when you're worked up either way, sorrow or joy.
+There's a real pleasure in being drunk, I'm sure.  While it lasts you're
+rich, and you're young, and you don't care what happens.  It's kind of
+you to take it like this, sir, seeing you've never been tempted and
+mightn't understand."  David shook his head sadly, and looked at Soolsby
+in silence.
+
+"I don't suppose he took a quarter what he used to take, but it made him
+drunk.  'Twas but a minute of madness.  You've saved him right enough."
+
+"I was not blaming him.  I understand--I understand."
+
+He looked at her clearly.  She was healthy and fine-looking, with large,
+eloquent eyes.  Her dress was severe and quiet, as became her occupation
+--a plain, dark grey, but the shapely fulness of the figure gave softness
+to the outlines.  It was no wonder Jasper Kimber wished to marry her;
+and, if he did, the future of the man was sure.  She had a temperament
+which might have made her an adventuress--or an opera-singer.  She had
+been touched in time, and she had never looked back.
+
+"You are with Lady Eglington now, I have heard?" he asked.
+
+She nodded.
+
+"It was hard for you in London at first?"
+
+She met his look steadily.  "It was easy in a way.  I could see round me
+what was the right thing to do.  Oh, that was what was so awful in the
+old life over there at Heddington,"--she pointed beyond the hill, "we
+didn't know what was good and what was bad.  The poor people in big
+working-places like Heddington ain't much better than heathens, leastways
+as to most things that matter.  They haven't got a sensible religion, not
+one that gets down into what they do.  The parson doesn't reach them--he
+talks about church and the sacraments, and they don't get at what good
+it's going to do them.  And the chapel preachers ain't much better.
+They talk and sing and pray, when what the people want is light,
+and hot water, and soap, and being shown how to live, and how to bring
+up children healthy and strong, and decent-cooked food.  I'd have food-
+hospitals if I could, and I'd give the children in the schools one good
+meal a day.  I'm sure the children of the poor go wrong and bad more
+through the way they live than anything.  If only they was taught right
+--not as though they was paupers!  Give me enough nurses of the right
+sort, and enough good, plain cooks, and meat three times a week, and milk
+and bread and rice and porridge every day, and I'd make a new place of
+any town in England in a year.  I'd--"
+
+She stopped all at once, however, and flushing, said: "I didn't stop to
+think I was talking to you, sir."
+
+"I am glad you speak to me so," he answered gently.  "You and I are both
+reformers at heart."
+
+"Me?  I've done nothing, sir, not any good to anybody or anything."
+
+"Not to Jasper Kimber?"
+
+"You did that, sir; he says so; he says you made him."
+
+A quick laugh passed David's lips.  "Men are not made so easily.  I think
+I know the trowel and the mortar that built that wall!  Thee will marry
+him, friend?"
+
+Her eyes burned as she looked at him.  She had been eternally
+dispossessed of what every woman has the right to have--one memory
+possessing the elements of beauty.  Even if it remain but for the moment,
+yet that moment is hers by right of her sex, which is denied the wider
+rights of those they love and serve.  She had tasted the cup of
+bitterness and drunk of the waters of sacrifice.  Married life had no
+lure for her.  She wanted none of it.  The seed of service had, however,
+taken root in a nature full of fire and light and power, undisciplined
+and undeveloped as it was.  She wished to do something--the spirit of
+toil, the first habit of the life of the poor, the natural medium for the
+good that may be in them, had possession of her.
+
+This man was to her the symbol of work.  To have cared for his home, to
+have looked after his daily needs, to have sheltered him humbly from
+little things, would have been her one true happiness.  And this was
+denied her.  Had she been a man, it would have been so easy.  She could
+have offered to be his servant; could have done those things which she
+could do better than any, since hers would be a heart-service.
+
+But even as she looked at him now, she had a flash of insight and
+prescience.  She had, from little things said or done, from newspapers
+marked and a hundred small indications, made up her mind that her
+mistress's mind dwelt much upon "the Egyptian."  The thought flashed now
+that she might serve this man, after all; that a day might come when she
+could say that she had played a part in his happiness, in return for all
+he had done for her.  Life had its chances--and strange things had
+happened.  In her own mind she had decided that her mistress was not
+happy, and who could tell what might happen?  Men did not live for ever!
+The thought came and went, but it left behind a determination to answer
+David as she felt.
+
+"I will not marry Jasper," she answered slowly.  "I want work, not
+marriage."
+
+"There would be both," he urged.
+
+"With women there is the one or the other, not both."
+
+"Thee could help him.  He has done credit to himself, and he can do good
+work for England.  Thee can help him."
+
+"I want work alone, not marriage, sir."
+
+"He would pay thee his debt."
+
+"He owes me nothing.  What happened was no fault of his, but of the life
+we were born in.  He tired of me, and left me.  Husbands tire of their
+wives, but stay on and beat them."
+
+"He drove thee mad almost, I remember."
+
+"Wives go mad and are never cured, so many of them.  I've seen them die,
+poor things, and leave the little ones behind.  I had the luck wi' me.
+I took the right turning at the cross-roads yonder."
+
+"Thee must be Jasper's wife if he asks thee again," he urged.
+
+"He will come when I call, but I will not call," she answered.
+
+"But still thee will marry him when the heart is ready," he persisted.
+"It shall be ready soon.  He needs thee.  Good-bye, friend.  Leave
+Soolsby alone.  He will be safe.  And do not tell him that I have seen
+him so."  He stooped over and touched the old man's shoulder gently.
+
+He held out his hand to her.  She took it, then suddenly leaned over and
+kissed it.  She could not speak.
+
+He stepped to the door and looked out.  Behind the Red Mansion the sun
+was setting, and the far garden looked cool and sweet.  He gave a happy
+sigh, and stepped out and down.
+
+As he disappeared, the woman dropped into a chair, her arms upon a table.
+Her body shook with sobs.  She sat there for an hour, and then, when the
+sun was setting, she left the drunken man sleeping, and made her way down
+the hill to the Cloistered House.  Entering, she was summoned to her
+mistress's room.  "I did not expect my lady so soon," she said,
+surprised.
+
+"No; we came sooner than we expected.  Where have you been?"
+
+"At Soolsby's hut on the hill, my lady."
+
+"Who is Soolsby?"
+
+Kate told her all she knew, and of what had happened that afternoon--but
+not all.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+"THERE IS NOTHING HIDDEN WHICH SHALL NOT BE REVEALED"
+
+A fortnight had passed since they had come to Hamley--David, Eglington,
+and Hylda--and they had all travelled a long distance in mutual
+understanding during that time, too far, thought Luke Claridge, who
+remained neutral and silent.  He would not let Faith go to the Cloistered
+House, though he made no protest against David going; because he
+recognised in these visits the duty of diplomacy and the business of the
+nation--more particularly David's business, which, in his eyes, swallowed
+all.  Three times David had gone to the Cloistered House; once Hylda and
+he had met in the road leading to the old mill, and once at Soolsby's
+hut.  Twice, also, in the garden of his old home he had seen her, when
+she came to visit Faith, who had captured her heart at once.  Eglington
+and Faith had not met, however.  He was either busy in his laboratory,
+or with his books, or riding over the common and through the woods,
+and their courses lay apart.
+
+But there came an afternoon when Hylda and David were a long hour
+together at the Cloistered House.  They talked freely of his work in
+Egypt.  At last she said: "And Nahoum Pasha?"
+
+"He has kept faith."
+
+"He is in high place again?"
+
+"He is a good administrator."
+
+"You put him there!"
+
+"Thee remembers what I said to him, that night in Cairo?"
+
+Hylda closed her eyes and drew in a long breath.  Had there been a word
+spoken that night when she and David and Nahoum met which had not bitten
+into her soul!  That David had done so much in Egypt without ruin or
+death was a tribute to his power.  Nevertheless, though Nahoum had not
+struck yet, she was certain he would one day.  All that David now told
+her of the vicissitudes of his plans, and Nahoum's sympathy and help,
+only deepened this conviction.  She could well believe that Nahoum gave
+David money from his own pocket, which he replaced by extortion from
+other sources, while gaining credit with David for co-operation.
+Armenian Christian Nahoum might be, but he was ranged with the East
+against the West, with the reactionary and corrupt against advance,
+against civilisation and freedom and equality.  Nahoum's Christianity was
+permeated with Orientalism, the Christian belief obscured by the theism
+of the Muslim.  David was in a deadlier struggle than he knew.  Yet it
+could serve no good end to attempt to warn him now.  He had outlived
+peril so far; might it not be that, after all, he would win?
+
+So far she had avoided Nahoum's name in talks with David.  She could
+scarcely tell why she did, save that it opened a door better closed,
+as it were; but the restraint had given way at last.
+
+"Thee remembers what I said that night?" David repeated slowly.
+
+"I remember--I understand.  You devise your course and you never change.
+It is like building on a rock.  That is why nothing happens to you as bad
+as might happen."
+
+"Nothing bad ever happens to me."
+
+"The philosophy of the desert," she commented smiling.  "You are living
+in the desert even when you are here.  This is a dream; the desert and
+Egypt only are real.
+
+"That is true, I think.  I seem sometimes like a sojourner here, like a
+spirit 'revisiting the scenes of life and time.'"  He laughed boyishly.
+
+"Yet you are happy here.  I understand now why and how you are what you
+are.  Even I that have been here so short a time feel the influence upon
+me.  I breathe an air that, somehow, seems a native air.  The spirit of
+my Quaker grandmother revives in me.  Sometimes I sit hours thinking,
+scarcely stirring; and I believe I know now how people might speak to
+each other without words.  Your Uncle Benn and you--it was so with you,
+was it not?  You heard his voice speaking to you sometimes; you
+understood what he meant to say to you?  You told me so long ago."
+
+David inclined his head.  "I heard him speak as one might speak through
+a closed door.  Sometimes, too, in the desert I have heard Faith speak
+to me."
+
+"And your grandfather?"
+
+"Never my grandfather--never.  It would seem as though, in my thoughts,
+I could never reach him; as though masses of opaque things lay between.
+Yet he and I--there is love between us.  I don't know why I never hear
+him."
+
+"Tell me of your childhood, of your mother.  I have seen her grave under
+the ash by the Meeting-house, but I want to know of her from you."
+
+"Has not Faith told you?"
+
+"We have only talked of the present.  I could not ask her; but I can ask
+you.  I want to know of your mother and you together."
+
+"We were never together.  When I opened my eyes she closed hers.  It was
+so little to get for the life she gave.  See, was it not a good face?"
+He drew from his pocket a little locket which Faith had given him years
+ago, and opened it before her.
+
+Hylda looked long.  "She was exquisite," she said, "exquisite."
+
+"My father I never knew either.  He was a captain of a merchant ship.
+He married her secretly while she was staying with an aunt at Portsmouth.
+He sailed away, my mother told my grandfather all, and he brought her
+home here.  The marriage was regular, of course, but my grandfather,
+after announcing it, and bringing it before the Elders, declared that she
+should never see her husband again.  She never did, for she died a few
+months after, when I came, and my father died very soon, also.  I never
+saw him, and I do not know if he ever tried to see me.  I never had any
+feeling about it.  My grandfather was the only father I ever knew, and
+Faith, who was born a year before me, became like a sister to me, though
+she soon made other pretensions!"  He laughed again, almost happily.
+"To gain an end she exercised authority as my aunt!"
+
+"What was your father's name?"
+
+"Fetherdon--James Fetherdon."
+
+"Fetherdon--James Fetherdon !"  Involuntarily Hylda repeated the name
+after him.  Where had she heard the name before--or where had she seen
+it?  It kept flashing before her eyes.  Where had she seen it?  For days
+she had been rummaging among old papers in the library of the Cloistered
+House, and in an old box full of correspondence and papers of the late
+countess, who had died suddenly.  Was it among them that she had seen the
+name?  She could not tell.  It was all vague, but that she had seen it or
+heard it she was sure.
+
+"Your father's people, you never knew them?"
+
+He shook his head.  "Nor of them.  Here was my home--I had no desire to
+discover them.  We draw in upon ourselves here."
+
+"There is great force in such a life and such a people," she answered.
+"If the same concentration of mind could be carried into the wide life of
+the world, we might revolutionise civilisation; or vitalise and advance
+it, I mean--as you are doing in Egypt."
+
+"I have done nothing in Egypt.  I have sounded the bugle--I have not had
+my fight."
+
+"That is true in a sense," she replied.  "Your real struggle is before
+you.  I do not know why I say it, but I do say it; I feel it.  Something
+here"--she pressed her hand to her heart--"something here tells me that
+your day of battle is yet to come."  Her eyes were brimming and full of
+excitement.  "We must all help you."  She gained courage with each word.
+"You must not fight alone.  You work for civilisation; you must have
+civilisation behind you."  Her hands clasped nervously; there was a catch
+in her throat.  "You remember then, that I said I would call to you one
+day, as your Uncle Benn did, and you should hear and answer me.  It shall
+not be that I will call.  You--you will call, and I will help you if I
+can.  I will help, no matter what may seem to prevent, if there is
+anything I can do.  I, surely I, of all the world owe it to you to do
+what I can, always.
+
+"I owe so much--you did so much.  Oh, how it haunts me!  Sometimes in the
+night I wake with a start and see it all--all!"
+
+The flood which had been dyked back these years past had broken loose in
+her heart.
+
+Out of the stir and sweep of social life and duty, of official and
+political ambition-heart-hungry, for she had no child; heart-lonely,
+though she had scarce recognised it in the duties and excitements round
+her--she had floated suddenly into this backwater of a motionless life in
+Hamley.  Its quiet had settled upon her, the shackles of her spirit had
+been loosed, and dropped from her; she had suddenly bathed her heart and
+soul in a freer atmosphere than they had ever known before.  And David
+and Hamley had come together.  The old impulses, dominated by a divine
+altruism, were swinging her out upon a course leading she knew not,
+reeked not, whither--for the moment reeked not.  This man's career, the
+work he was set to do, the ideal before him, the vision of a land
+redeemed, captured her, carried her panting into a resolve which, however
+she might modify her speech or action, must be an influence in her life
+hereafter.  Must the penance and the redemption be his only?  This life
+he lived had come from what had happened to her and to him in Egypt.
+In a deep sense her life was linked with his.
+
+In a flash David now felt the deep significance of their relations.
+A curtain seemed suddenly to have been drawn aside.  He was blinded for
+a moment.  Her sympathy, her desire to help, gave him a new sense of hope
+and confidence, but--but there was no room in his crusade for any woman;
+the dear egotism of a life-dream was masterful in him, possessed him.
+
+Yet, if ever his heart might have dwelt upon a woman with thought of the
+future, this being before him--he drew himself up with a start!  .  .  .
+He was going to Egypt again in a few days; they might probably never meet
+again--would not, no doubt--should not.  He had pressed her husband to go
+to Egypt, but now he would not encourage it; he must "finish his journey
+alone."
+
+He looked again in her eyes, and their light and beauty held him.  His
+own eyes swam.  The exaltation of a great idea was upon them, was a bond
+of fate between them.  It was a moment of peril not fully realised by
+either.  David did realise, however, that she was beautiful beyond all
+women he had ever seen--or was he now for the first time really aware of
+the beauty of woman?  She had an expression, a light of eye and face,
+finely alluring beyond mere outline of feature.  Yet the features were
+there, too, regular and fine; and her brown hair waving away from her
+broad, white forehead over eyes a greyish violet in colour gave her a
+classic distinction.  In the quietness of the face there was that strain
+of the Quaker, descending to her through three generations, yet enlivened
+by a mind of impulse and genius.
+
+They stood looking at each other for a moment, in which both had taken a
+long step forward in life's experience.  But presently his eyes looked
+beyond her, as though at something that fascinated them.
+
+"Of what are you thinking?  What do you see?" she asked.
+
+"You, leaving the garden of my house in Cairo, I standing by the fire,"
+he answered, closing his eyes for an instant.
+
+"It is what I saw also," she said breathlessly.  "It is what I saw and
+was thinking of that instant."  When, as though she must break away from
+the cords of feeling drawing her nearer and nearer to him, she said, with
+a little laugh, "Tell me again of my Chicago cousin?  I have not had a
+letter for a year."
+
+"Lacey, he is with me always.  I should have done little had it not been
+for him.  He has remarkable resource; he is never cast down.  He has but
+one fault."
+
+"What is that?"
+
+"He is no respecter of persons.  His humour cuts deep.  He has a wide
+heart for your sex.  When leaving the court of the King of Abyssinia he
+said to his Majesty: 'Well, good-bye, King.  Give my love to the girls.'"
+
+She laughed again.  "How absurd and childish he is!  But he is true and
+able.  And how glad you should be that you are able to make true friends,
+without an effort.  Yesterday I met neighbour Fairley, and another little
+old Elder who keeps his chin in his collar and his eyes on the sky.  They
+did little else but sing your praises.  One might have thought that you
+had invented the world-or Hamley."
+
+"Yet they would chafe if I were to appear among them without these."  He
+glanced down at the Quaker clothes he wore, and made a gesture towards
+the broadbrimmed hat reposing on a footstool near by.
+
+"It is good to see that you are not changed, not spoiled at all," she
+remarked, smiling.  "Though, indeed, how could you be, who always work
+for others and never for yourself?  All I envy you is your friends.  You
+make them and keep them so."
+
+She sighed, and a shadow came into her eyes suddenly.  She was thinking
+of Eglington.  Did he make friends--true friends?  In London--was there
+one she knew who would cleave to him for love of him?  In England--had
+she ever seen one?  In Hamley, where his people had been for so many
+generations, had she found one?
+
+Herself?  Yes, she was his true friend.  She would do what would she not
+do to help him, to serve his interests?  What had she not done since she
+married Her fortune, it was his; her every waking hour had been filled
+with something devised to help him on his way.  Had he ever said to her:
+"Hylda, you are a help to me"?  He had admired her--but was he singular
+in that?  Before she married there were many--since, there had been many
+--who had shown, some with tact and carefulness, others with a crudeness
+making her shudder, that they admired her; and, if they might, would have
+given their admiration another name with other manifestations.  Had she
+repelled it all?  She had been too sure of herself to draw her skirts
+about her; she was too proud to let any man put her at any disadvantage.
+She had been safe, because her heart had been untouched.  The Duchess of
+Snowdon, once beautiful, but now with a face like a mask, enamelled and
+rouged and lifeless, had said to her once: "My dear, I ought to have died
+at thirty.  When I was twenty-three I wanted to squeeze the orange dry in
+a handful of years, and then go out suddenly, and let the dust of
+forgetfulness cover my bones.  I had one child, a boy, and would have no
+more; and I squeezed the orange!  But I didn't go at thirty, and yet the
+orange was dry.  My boy died; and you see what I am--a fright, I know it;
+and I dress like a child of twenty; and I can't help it."
+
+There had been moments, once, when Hylda, too, had wished to squeeze the
+orange dry, but something behind, calling to her, had held her back.  She
+had dropped her anchor in perilous seas, but it had never dragged.
+
+"Tell me how to make friends--and keep them," she added gaily.
+
+"If it be true I make friends, thee taught me how," he answered, "for
+thee made me a friend, and I forget not the lesson."
+
+She smiled.  "Thee has learnt another lesson too well," she answered
+brightly.  "Thee must not flatter.  It is not that which makes thee keep
+friends.  Thee sees I also am speaking as they do in Hamley--am I not
+bold?  I love the grammarless speech."
+
+"Then use it freely to-day, for this is farewell," he answered, not
+looking at her.
+
+"This--is--farewell," she said slowly, vaguely.  Why should it startle
+her so?  "You are going so soon--where?"
+
+"To-morrow to London, next week to Egypt."
+
+She laid a hand upon herself, for her heart was beating violently.  "Thee
+is not fair to give no warning--there is so much to say," she said, in so
+low a tone that he could scarcely hear her.  "There is the future, your
+work, what we are to do here to help.  What I am to do.
+
+"Thee will always be a friend to Egypt, I know," he answered.  "She needs
+friends.  Thee has a place where thee can help."
+
+"Will not right be done without my voice?" she asked, her eyes half
+closing.  "There is the Foreign Office, and English policy, and the
+ministers, and--and Eglington.  What need of me?"
+
+He saw the thought had flashed into her mind that he did not trust her
+husband.  "Thee knows and cares for Egypt, and knowing and caring make
+policy easier to frame," he rejoined.
+
+Suddenly a wave of feeling went over her.  He whose life had been flung
+into this field of labour by an act of her own, who should help him but
+herself?
+
+But it all baffled her, hurt her, shook her.  She was not free to help as
+she wished.  Her life belonged to another; and he exacted the payment of
+tribute to the uttermost farthing.  She was blinded by the thought.  Yet
+she must speak.  "I will come to Egypt--we will come to Egypt," she said
+quickly.  "Eglington shall know, too; he shall understand.  You shall
+have his help.  You shall not work alone."
+
+"Thee can work here," he said.  "It may not be easy for Lord Eglington to
+come."
+
+"You pressed it on him."
+
+Their eyes met.  She suddenly saw what was in his mind.
+
+"You know best what will help you most," she added gently.
+
+"You will not come?" he asked.
+
+"I will not say I will not come--not ever," she answered firmly.  "It may
+be I should have to come."  Resolution was in her eyes.  She was thinking
+of Nahoum.  "I may have to come," she added after a pause, "to do right
+by you."
+
+He read her meaning.  "Thee will never come," he continued confidently.
+He held out his hand.  "Perhaps I shall see you in town," she rejoined,
+as her hand rested in his, and she looked away.  "When do you start for
+Egypt?"
+
+"To-morrow week, I think," he answered.  "There is much to do."
+
+"Perhaps we shall meet in town," she repeated.  But they both knew they
+would not.
+
+"Farewell," he said, and picked up his hat.
+
+As he turned again, the look in her eyes brought the blood to his face,
+then it became pale.  A new force had come into his life.
+
+"God be good to thee," he said, and turned away.
+
+She watched him leave the room and pass through the garden.
+
+"David!  David!" she said softly after him.
+
+At the other end of the room her husband, who had just entered, watched
+her.  He heard her voice, but did not hear what she said.
+
+"Come, Hylda, and have some music," he said brusquely.
+
+She scrutinised him calmly.  His face showed nothing.  His look was
+enigmatical.
+
+"Chopin is the thing for me," he said, and opened the piano.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+AS IN A GLASS DARKLY
+
+It was very quiet and cool in the Quaker Meeting-house, though outside
+there was the rustle of leaves, the low din of the bees, the whistle of a
+bird, or the even tread of horses' hoofs as they journeyed on the London
+road.  The place was full.  For a half-hour the worshippers had sat
+voiceless.  They were waiting for the spirit to move some one to speak.
+As they waited, a lady entered and glided into a seat.  Few saw, and
+these gave no indication of surprise, though they were little used to
+strangers, and none of the name borne by this lady had entered the
+building for many years.  It was Hylda.
+
+At last the silence was broken.  The wizened Elder, with eyes upon the
+ceiling and his long white chin like ivory on his great collar, began to
+pray, sitting where he was, his hands upon his knees.  He prayed for all
+who wandered "into by and forbidden paths."  He prayed for one whose work
+was as that of Joseph, son of Jacob; whose footsteps were now upon the
+sea, and now upon the desert; whose way was set among strange gods and
+divers heresies--"'For there must also be heresies, that they which are
+approved may be made manifest among the weak.'"  A moment more, and then
+he added: "He hath been tried beyond his years; do Thou uphold his hands.
+Once with a goad did we urge him on, when in ease and sloth he was among
+us, but now he spurreth on his spirit and body in too great haste.  O put
+Thy hand upon the bridle, Lord, that He ride soberly upon Thy business."
+
+There was a longer silence now, but at last came the voice of Luke
+Claridge.
+
+"Father of the fatherless," he said, "my days are as the sands in the
+hour-glass hastening to their rest; and my place will soon be empty.  He
+goeth far, and I may not go with him.  He fighteth alone, like him that
+strove with wild beasts at Ephesus; do Thou uphold him that he may bring
+a nation captive.  And if a viper fasten on his hand, as chanced to Paul
+of old, give him grace to strike it off without hurt.  O Lord, he is to
+me, Thy servant, as the one ewe lamb; let him be Thine when Thou
+gatherest for Thy vineyard!"
+
+"And if a viper fasten on his hand--" David passed his hand across his
+forehead and closed his eyes.  The beasts at Ephesus he had fought, and
+he would fight them again--there was fighting enough to do in the land of
+Egypt.  And the viper would fasten on his hand--it had fastened on his
+hand, and he had struck it off; but it would come again, the dark thing
+against which he had fought in the desert.
+
+Their prayers had unnerved him, had got into that corner of his nature
+where youth and its irresponsibility loitered yet.  For a moment he was
+shaken, and then, looking into the faces of the Elders, said: "Friends, I
+go again upon paths that lead into the wilderness.  I know not if I ever
+shall return.  Howsoe'er that may be, I shall walk with firmer step
+because of all ye do for me."
+
+He closed his eyes and prayed: "O God, I go into the land of ancient
+plagues and present pestilence.  If it be Thy will, bring me home to this
+good land, when my task is done.  If not, by Thy goodness let me be as a
+stone set by the wayside for others who come after; and save me from the
+beast and from the viper.  'Thou art faithful, who wilt not suffer us to
+be tempted above that we are able; but wilt with the temptation also make
+a way of escape, that we may be able to bear it!'"
+
+He sat down, and all grew silent again; but suddenly some one sobbed
+aloud-sobbed, and strove to stay the sobbing, and could not, and, getting
+up, hastened towards the door.
+
+It was Faith.  David heard, and came quickly after her.  As he took her
+arm gently, his eyes met those of Hylda.  She rose and came out also.
+
+"Will thee take her home?" he said huskily.  "I can bear no more."
+
+Hylda placed her arm round Faith, and led her out under the trees and
+into the wood.  As they went, Faith looked back.
+
+"Oh, forgive me, forgive me, Davy," she said softly.
+
+Three lights burned in Hamley: one in the Red Mansion, one in the
+Cloistered House, and one in Soolsby's hut upon the hill.  In the Red
+Mansion old Luke Claridge, his face pale with feeling, his white hair
+tumbling about, his head thrust forward, his eyes shining, sat listening,
+as Faith read aloud letters which Benn Claridge had written from the East
+many years before.  One letter, written from Bagdad, he made her read
+twice.  The faded sheet had in it the glow and glamour of the East; it
+was like a heart beating with life; emotion rose and fell in it like the
+waves of the sea.  Once the old man interrupted Faith.
+
+"Davy--it is as though Davy spoke.  It is like Davy--both Claridge, both
+Claridge," he said.  "But is it not like Davy?  Davy is doing what it was
+in Benn's heart to do.  Benn showed the way; Benn called, and Davy came."
+
+He laid both hands upon his knees and raised his eyes.  "O Lord, I have
+sought to do according to Thy will," he whispered.  He was thinking of a
+thing he had long hidden.  Through many years he had no doubt, no qualm;
+but, since David had gone to Egypt, some spirit of unquiet had worked in
+him.  He had acted against the prayer of his own wife, lying in her
+grave--a quiet-faced woman, who had never crossed him, who had never
+shown a note of passion in all her life, save in one thing concerning
+David.  Upon it, like some prophetess, she had flamed out.  With the
+insight which only women have where children are concerned, she had told
+him that he would live to repent of what he had done.  She had died soon
+after, and was laid beside the deserted young mother, whose days had
+budded and blossomed, and fallen like petals to the ground, while yet it
+was the spring.
+
+Luke Claridge had understood neither, not his wife when she had said:
+"Thee should let the Lord do His own work, Luke," nor his dying daughter
+Mercy, whose last words had been: "With love and sorrow I have sowed; he
+shall reap rejoicing--my babe.  Thee will set him in the garden in the
+sun, where God may find him--God will not pass him by.  He will take him
+by the hand and lead him home."  The old man had thought her touched by
+delirium then, though her words were but the parable of a mind fed by the
+poetry of life, by a shy spirit, to which meditation gave fancy and
+farseeing.  David had come by his idealism honestly.  The half-mystical
+spirit of his Uncle Benn had flowed on to another generation through the
+filter of a woman's sad soul.  It had come to David a pure force, a
+constructive and practical idealism.
+
+Now, as Faith read, there were ringing in the old man's ears the words
+which David's mother had said before she closed her eyes and passed away:
+"Set him in the garden in the sun, where God may find him--God will not
+pass him by."  They seemed to weave themselves into the symbolism of Benn
+Claridge's letter, written from the hills of Bagdad.
+
+"But," the letter continued, "the Governor passed by with his suite, the
+buckles of the harness of his horses all silver, his carriage shining
+with inlay of gold, his turban full of precious stones.  When he had
+passed, I said to a shepherd standing by, 'If thou hadst all his wealth,
+shepherd, what wouldst thou do?' and he answered, 'If I had his wealth, I
+would sit on the south side of my house in the sun all day and every
+day.'  To a messenger of the Palace, who must ever be ready night and day
+to run at his master's order, I asked the same.  He replied, 'If I had
+all the Effendina's wealth, I would sleep till I died.'  To a blind
+beggar, shaking the copper in his cup in the highways, pleading dumbly to
+those who passed, I made similar inquisition, and he replied 'If the
+wealth of the exalted one were mine, I would sit on the mastaba by the
+bake-house, and eat three times a day, save at Ramadan, when I would
+bless Allah the compassionate and merciful, and breakfast at sunset with
+the flesh of a kid and a dish of dates.'  To a woman at the door of a
+tomb hung with relics of hundreds of poor souls in misery, who besought
+the buried saint to intercede for her with Allah, I made the same
+catechism, and she answered, 'Oh, effendi, if his wealth were mine,
+I would give my son what he has lost.'  'What has he lost, woman?' said
+I; and she answered: 'A little house with a garden, and a flock of ten
+goats, a cow and a dovecote, his inheritance of which he has been
+despoiled by one who carried a false debt 'gainst his dead father.'  And
+I said to her: 'But if thy wealth were as that of the ruler of the city,
+thy son would have no need of the little house and garden and the flock
+of goats, and a cow and a dovecote.'  Whereupon she turned upon me in
+bitterness, and said: 'Were they not his own as the seed of his father?
+Shall not one cherish that which is his own, which cometh from seed to
+seed?  Is it not the law?'  'But,' said I, 'if his wealth were thine,
+there would be herds of cattle, and flocks of sheep, and carpets spread,
+and the banquet-tables, and great orchards.'  But she stubbornly shook
+her head.  'Where the eagle built shall not the young eagle nest?  How
+should God meet me in the way and bless him who stood not by his birth
+right?  The plot of ground was the lad's, and all that is thereon.
+I pray thee, mock me not.'  God knows I did not mock her, for her words
+were wisdom.  So did it work upon me that, after many days, I got for the
+lad his own again, and there he is happier, and his mother happier, than
+the Governor in his palace.  Later I did learn some truths from the
+shepherd, the messenger, and the beggar, and the woman with the child;
+but chiefly from the woman and the child.  The material value has no
+relation to the value each sets upon that which is his own.  Behind this
+feeling lies the strength of the world.  Here on this hill of Bagdad I am
+thinking these things.  And, Luke, I would have thee also think on my
+story of the woman and the child.  There is in it a lesson for thee."
+
+When Luke Claridge first read this letter years before, he had put it
+from him sternly.  Now he heard it with a soft emotion.  He took the
+letter from Faith at last and put it in his pocket.  With no apparent
+relevancy, and laying his hand on Faith's shoulder, he said:
+
+"We have done according to our conscience by Davy--God is our witness,
+so!"
+
+She leaned her cheek against his hand, but did not speak.
+
+In Soolsby's hut upon the hill David sat talking to the old chair-maker.
+Since his return he had visited the place several times, only to find
+Soolsby absent.  The old man, on awaking from his drunken sleep, had been
+visited by a terrible remorse, and, whenever he had seen David coming,
+had fled into the woods.  This evening, however, David came in the dark,
+and Soolsby was caught.
+
+When David entered first, the old man broke down.  He could not speak,
+but leaned upon the back of a chair, and though his lips moved, no sound
+came forth.  But David took him by the shoulders and set him down, and
+laughed gently in his face, and at last Soolsby got voice and said:
+
+"Egyptian!  O Egyptian!"
+
+Then his tongue was loosened and his eye glistened, and he poured out
+question after question, many pertinent, some whimsical, all frankly
+answered by David.  But suddenly he stopped short, and his eyes sank
+before the other, who had laid a hand upon his knee.
+
+"But don't, Egyptian, don't!  Don't have aught to do with me.  I'm only a
+drunken swine.  I kept sober four years, as she knows--as the Angel down
+yonder in the Red Mansion knows; but the day you came, going out to meet
+you, I got drunk--blind drunk.  I had only been pretending all the time.
+I was being coaxed along--made believe I was a real man, I suppose.  But
+I wasn't.  I was a pillar of sand.  When pressure came I just broke down
+--broke down, Egyptian.  Don't be surprised if you hear me grunt.  It's
+my natural speech.  I'm a hog, a drink-swilling hog.  I wasn't decent
+enough to stay sober till you had said 'Good day,' and 'How goes it,
+Soolsby?' I tried it on; it was no good.  I began to live like a man, but
+I've slipped back into the ditch.  You didn't know that, did you?"
+
+David let him have his say, and then in a low voice said: "Yes, I knew
+thee had been drinking, Soolsby."  He started.  "She told you--Kate
+Heaver--"
+
+"She did not tell me.  I came and found you here with her.  You were
+asleep."
+
+"A drunken sweep!"  He spat upon the ground in disgust at himself.
+
+"I ought never have comeback here," he added.  "It was no place for me.
+But it drew me.  I didn't belong; but it drew me."
+
+"Thee belongs to Hamley.  Thee is an honour to Hamley, Soolsby."
+
+Soolsby's eyes widened; the blurred look of rage and self-reproach in
+them began to fade away.
+
+"Thee has made a fight, Soolsby, to conquer a thing that has had thee by
+the throat.  There's no fighting like it.  It means a watching every
+hour, every minute--thee can never take the eye off it.  Some days it's
+easy, some days it's hard, but it's never so easy that you can say,
+'There is no need to watch.'  In sleep it whispers and wakes you; in the
+morning, when there are no shadows, it casts a shadow on the path.  It
+comes between you and your work; you see it looking out of the eyes of a
+friend.  And one day, when you think it has been conquered, that you have
+worn it down into oblivion and the dust, and you close your eyes and say,
+'I am master,' up it springs with fury from nowhere you can see, and
+catches you by the throat; and the fight begins again.  But you sit
+stronger, and the fight becomes shorter; and after many battles, and you
+have learned never to be off guard, to know by instinct where every
+ambush is, then at last the victory is yours.  It is hard, it is bitter,
+and sometimes it seems hardly worth the struggle.  But it is--it is worth
+the struggle, dear old man."
+
+Soolsby dropped on his knees and caught David by the arms.  "How did you
+know-how did you know?" he asked hoarsely.  "It's been just as you say.
+You've watched some one fighting?"
+
+"I have watched some one fighting--fighting," answered David clearly, but
+his eyes were moist.
+
+"With drink, the same as me?"
+
+"No, with opium--laudanum."
+
+"Oh, I've heard that's worse, that it makes you mad, the wanting it."
+
+"I have seen it so."
+
+"Did the man break down like me?"
+
+"Only once, but the fight is not yet over with him."  "Was he--an
+Englishman?"
+
+David inclined his head.  "It's a great thing to have a temptation to
+fight, Soolsby.  Then we can understand others."
+
+"It's not always true, Egyptian, for you have never had temptation to
+fight.  Yet you know it all."
+
+"God has been good to me," David answered, putting a hand on the old
+man's shoulder.  "And thee is a credit to Hamley, friend.  Thee will
+never fall again."
+
+"You know that--you say that to me!  Then, by Mary the mother of God, I
+never will be a swine again," he said, getting to his feet.
+
+"Well, good-bye, Soolsby.  I go to-morrow," David said presently.
+
+Soolsby frowned; his lips worked.  "When will you come back?" he asked
+eagerly.
+
+David smiled.  "There is so much to do, they may not let me come--not
+soon.  I am going into the desert again."
+
+Soolsby was shaking.  He spoke huskily.  "Here is your place," he said.
+"You shall come back--Oh, but you shall come back, here, where you
+belong."
+
+David shook his head and smiled, and clasped the strong hand again.  A
+moment later he was gone.  From the door of the but Soolsby muttered to
+himself:
+
+"I will bring you back.  If Luke Claridge doesn't, then I will bring you
+back.  If he dies, I will bring you--no, by the love of God, I will bring
+you back while he lives!"
+
+                    ...........................
+
+Two thousand miles away, in a Nile village, women sat wailing in dark
+doorways, dust on their heads, black mantles covering their faces.  By
+the pond where all the people drank, performed their ablutions, bathed
+their bodies and rinsed their mouths, sat the sheikh-el-beled, the
+village chief, taking counsel in sorrow with the barber, the holy man,
+and others.  Now speaking, now rocking their bodies to and fro, in the
+evening sunlight, they sat and watched the Nile in flood covering the
+wide wastes of the Fayoum, spreading over the land rich deposits of earth
+from the mountains of Abyssinia.  When that flood subsided there would be
+fields to be planted with dourha and onions and sugar-cane; but they
+whose strong arms should plough and sow and wield the sickle, the youth,
+the upstanding ones, had been carried off in chains to serve in the army
+of Egypt, destined for the far Soudan, for hardship, misery, and death,
+never to see their kindred any more.  Twice during three months had the
+dread servant of the Palace come and driven off their best like sheep to
+the slaughter.  The brave, the stalwart, the bread-winners, were gone;
+and yet the tax-gatherer would come and press for every impost--on the
+onion-field, the date-palm, the dourha-field, and the clump of sugar-
+cane, as though the young men, the toilers, were still there.  The old
+and infirm, the children, the women, must now double and treble their
+labour.  The old men must go to the corvee, and mend the banks of the
+Nile for the Prince and his pashas, providing their own food, their own
+tools, their own housing, if housing there would be--if it was more than
+sleeping under a bush by the riverside, or crawling into a hole in the
+ground, their yeleks their clothes by day, their only covering at night.
+
+They sat like men without hope, yet with the proud, bitter mien of those
+who had known good and had lost it, had seen content and now were
+desolate.
+
+Presently one--a lad--the youngest of them, lifted up his voice and began
+to chant a recitative, while another took a small drum and beat it in
+unison.  He was but just recovered from an illness, or he had gone also
+in chains to die for he knew not what, leaving behind without hope all
+that he loved:
+
+         "How has the cloud fallen, and the leaf withered on the tree,
+          The lemon-tree, that standeth by the door.
+          The melon and the date have gone bitter to the taste,
+          The weevil, it has eaten at the core
+          The core of my heart, the mildew findeth it.
+          My music, it is but the drip of tears,
+          The garner empty standeth, the oven hath no fire,
+          Night filleth me with fears.
+          O Nile that floweth deeply, hast thou not heard his voice?
+          His footsteps hast thou covered with thy flood?
+          He was as one who lifteth up the yoke,
+          He was as one who taketh off the chain,
+          As one who sheltereth from the rain,
+          As one who scattereth bread to the pigeons flying.
+          His purse was at his side, his mantle was for me,
+          For any who passeth were his mantle and his purse,
+          And now like a gourd is he withered from our eyes.
+          His friendship, it was like a shady wood
+          Whither has he gone?--Who shall speak for us?
+          Who shall save us from the kourbash and the stripes?
+          Who shall proclaim us in the palace?
+          Who shall contend for us in the gate?
+          The sakkia turneth no more; the oxen they are gone;
+          The young go forth in chains, the old waken in the night,
+          They waken and weep, for the wheel turns backward,
+          And the dark days are come again upon us--
+          Will he return no more?
+          His friendship was like a shady wood,
+          O Nile that floweth deeply, hast thou not heard his voice?
+          Hast thou covered up his footsteps with thy flood?
+          The core of my heart, the mildew findeth it!"
+
+Another-an old man-took up the strain, as the drum kept time to the beat
+of the voice with its undulating call and refrain:
+
+"When his footsteps were among us there was peace;
+War entered not the village, nor the call of war.
+Now our homes are as those that have no roofs.
+As a nest decayed, as a cave forsaken,
+As a ship that lieth broken on the beach,
+Is the house where we were born.
+Out in the desert did we bury our gold,
+We buried it where no man robbed us, for his arm was strong.
+Now are the jars empty, gold did not avail
+To save our young men, to keep them from the chains.
+God hath swallowed his voice, or the sea hath drowned it,
+Or the Nile hath covered him with its flood;
+Else would he come when our voices call.
+His word was honey in the prince's ear
+Will he return no more?"
+
+And now the sheikh-el-beled spoke.  "It hath been so since Nahoum Pasha
+passed this way four months agone.  He hath changed all.  War will not
+avail.  David Pasha, he will come again.  His word is as the centre of
+the world.  Ye have no hope, because ye see the hawks among the starving
+sheep.  But the shepherd will return from behind the hill, and the hawks
+will flee away.
+
+".  .  .  Behold, once was I in the desert.  Listen, for mine are the
+words of one who hath travelled far--was I not at Damascus and Palmyra
+and Bagdad, and at Medina by the tomb of Mahomet?"
+
+Reverently he touched the green turban on his head, evidence of his
+journey to Mahomet's tomb.  "Once in the desert I saw afar off an oasis
+of wood and water, and flying things, and houses where a man might rest.
+And I got me down from my camel, and knelt upon my sheepskin, and gave
+thanks in the name of Allah.  Thereupon I mounted again and rode on
+towards that goodly place.  But as I rode it vanished from my sight.
+Then did I mourn.  Yet once again I saw the trees, and flocks of pigeons
+and waving fields, and I was hungry and thirsty, and longed exceedingly.
+Yet got I down, and, upon my sheep-skin, once more gave thanks to Allah.
+And I mounted thereafter in haste and rode on; but once again was I
+mocked.  Then I cried aloud in my despair.  It was in my heart to die
+upon the sheep-skin where I had prayed; for I was burned up within, and
+there seemed naught to do but say malaish, and go hence.  But that goodly
+sight came again.  My heart rebelled that I should be so mocked.  I bent
+down my head upon my camel that I might not see, yet once more I loosed
+the sheep-skin.  Lifting up my heart, I looked again, and again I took
+hope and rode on.  Farther and farther I rode, and lo!  I was no longer
+mocked; for I came to a goodly place of water and trees, and was saved.
+So shall it be with us.  We have looked for his coming again, and our
+hearts have fallen and been as ashes, for that he has not come.  Yet
+there be mirages, and one day soon David Pasha will come hither, and our
+pains shall be eased."
+
+"Aiwa, aiwa--yes, yes," cried the lad who had sung to them.
+
+"Aiwa, aiwa," rang softly over the pond, where naked children stooped to
+drink.
+
+The smell of the cooking-pots floated out from the mud-houses near by.
+
+"Malaish," said one after another, "I am hungry.  He will come again-
+perhaps to-morrow."  So they moved towards the houses over the way.
+
+One cursed his woman for wailing in the doorway; one snatched the lid
+from a cooking-pot; one drew from an oven cakes of dourha, and gave them
+to those who had none; one knelt and bowed his forehead to the ground in
+prayer; one shouted the name of him whose coming they desired.
+
+So was David missed in Egypt.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+THE TENTS OF CUSHAN
+
+          "I saw the tents of Cushan in affliction, and the curtains
+          of the Land of Midian did tremble."
+
+A Hurdy-Gurdy was standing at the corner, playing with shrill insistence
+a medley of Scottish airs.  Now "Loch Lomond" pleaded for pennies from
+the upper windows:
+
+              "For you'll tak' the high road,
+               and I'll tak' the low road,
+               And I'll be in Scotland before ye:
+               But I and my true love will never meet again,
+               On the bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond!"
+
+The hurdy-gurdy was strident and insistent, but for a long time no
+response came.  At last, however, as the strains of "Loch Lomond" ceased,
+a lady appeared on the balcony of a drawing-room, and, leaning over a
+little forest of flowers and plants, threw a half-crown to the sorry
+street-musician.  She watched the grotesque thing trundle away, then
+entering the house again, took a 'cello from the corner of the room and
+tuned the instrument tenderly.  It was Hylda.
+
+Something of the peace of Hamley had followed her to London, but the
+poignant pain of it had come also.  Like Melisande, she had looked into
+the quiet pool of life and had seen her own face, its story and its
+foreshadowings.  Since then she had been "apart."  She had watched life
+move on rather than shared in its movement.  Things stood still for her.
+That apathy of soul was upon her which follows the inward struggle that
+exhausts the throb and fret of inward emotions, leaving the mind
+dominant, the will in abeyance.
+
+She had become conscious that her fate and future were suspended over a
+chasm, as, on the trapeze of a balloon, an adventurous aeronaut hangs
+uncertain over the hungry sea, waiting for the coming wind which will
+either blow the hazardous vessel to its doom or to safe refuge on the
+land.
+
+She had not seen David after he left Hamley.  Their last words had been
+spoken at the Meeting-house, when he gave Faith to her care.  That scene
+came back to her now, and a flush crept slowly over her face and faded
+away again.  She was recalling, too, the afternoon of that day when she
+and David had parted in the drawing-room of the Cloistered House, and
+Eglington had asked her to sing.  She thought of the hours with Eglington
+that followed, first at the piano and afterwards in the laboratory, where
+in his long blue smock he made experiments.  Had she not been conscious
+of something enigmatical in his gaiety that afternoon, in his cheerful
+yet cheerless words, she would have been deeply impressed by his
+appreciation of her playing, and his keen reflections on the merits of
+the composers; by his still keener attention to his subsequent
+experiments, and his amusing comments upon them.  But, somehow, that very
+cheerless cheerfulness seemed to proclaim him superficial.  Though she
+had no knowledge of science, she instinctively doubted his earnestness
+even in this work, which certainly was not pursued for effect.  She had
+put the feeling from her, but it kept returning.  She felt that in
+nothing did he touch the depths.  Nothing could possess him wholly;
+nothing inherent could make him self-effacing.
+
+Yet she wondered, too, if she was right, when she saw his fox-terrier
+watching him, ever watching him with his big brown eyes as he buoyantly
+worked, and saw him stoop to pat its head.  Or was this, after all, mere
+animalism, mere superficial vitality, love of health and being?  She
+shuddered, and shut her eyes, for it came home to her that to him she was
+just such a being of health, vitality and comeliness, on a little higher
+plane.  She put the thought from her, but it had had its birth, and it
+would not down.  He had immense vitality, he was tireless, and abundant
+in work and industry; he went from one thing to another with ease and
+swiftly changing eagerness.  Was it all mere force--mere man and mind?
+Was there no soul behind it?  There in the laboratory she had laid her
+hand on the terrier, and prayed in her heart that she might understand
+him for her own good, her own happiness, and his.  Above all else she
+wanted to love him truly, and to be loved truly, and duty was to her a
+daily sacrifice, a constant memorial.  She realised to the full that
+there lay before her a long race unilluminated by the sacred lamp which,
+lighted at the altar, should still be burning beside the grave.
+
+Now, as she thought of him, she kept saying to herself: "We should have
+worked out his life together.  Work together would have brought peace.
+He shuts me out--he shuts me out."
+
+At last she drew the bow across the instrument, once, twice, and then she
+began to play, forgetful of the world.  She had a contralto voice, and
+she sang with a depth of feeling and a delicate form worthy of a
+professional; on the piano she was effective and charming, but into the
+'cello she poured her soul.
+
+For quite an hour she played with scarce an interruption.  At last, with
+a sigh, she laid the instrument against her knee and gazed out of the
+window.  As she sat lost in her dream--a dream of the desert--a servant
+entered with letters.  One caught her eye.  It was from Egypt--from her
+cousin Lacey.  Her heart throbbed violently, yet she opened the official-
+looking envelope with steady fingers.  She would not admit even to her
+self that news from the desert could move her so.  She began to read
+slowly, but presently, with a little cry, she hastened through the pages.
+It ran:
+
+                                             THE SOUDAN.
+
+     DEAR LADY COUSIN,
+
+     I'm still not certain how I ought to style you, but I thought I'd
+     compromise as per above.  Anyway, it's a sure thing that I haven't
+     bothered you much with country-cousin letters.  I figure, however,
+     that you've put some money in Egypt, so to speak, and what happens
+     to this sandy-eyed foundling of the Nile you would like to know.  So
+     I've studied the only "complete letter-writer" I could find between
+     the tropic of Capricorn and Khartoum, and this is the contemptible
+     result, as the dagos in Mexico say.  This is a hot place by reason
+     of the sun that shines above us, and likewise it is hot because of
+     the niggers that swarm around us.  I figure, if we get out of this
+     portion of the African continent inside our skins, that we will have
+     put up a pretty good bluff, and pulled off a ticklish proposition.
+
+     It's a sort of early Christian business.  You see, David the Saadat
+     is great on moral suasion--he's a master of it; and he's never
+     failed yet--not altogether; though there have been minutes by a
+     stop-watch when I've thought it wouldn't stand the strain.  Like the
+     Mississippi steamboat which was so weak that when the whistle blew
+     the engines stopped!  When those frozen minutes have come to us,
+     I've tried to remember the correct religious etiquette, but I've not
+     had much practise since I stayed with Aunt Melissa, and lived on
+     skim-milk and early piety.  When things were looking as bad as they
+     did for Dives, "Now I lay me down to sleep," and "For what we are
+     about to receive," was all that I could think of.  But the Saadat,
+     he's a wonder from Wondertown.  With a little stick, or maybe his
+     flute under his arm, he'll smile and string these heathen along,
+     when you'd think they weren't waiting for anybody.  A spear took off
+     his fez yesterday.  He never blinked--he's a jim-dandy at keeping
+     cool; and when a hundred mounted heathens made a rush down on him
+     the other day, spears sticking out like quills on a porcupine--2.5
+     on the shell-road the chargers were going--did he stir?  Say, he
+     watched 'em as if they were playing for his benefit.  And sure
+     enough, he was right.  They parted either side of him when they were
+     ten feet away, and there he was quite safe, a blessing in the storm,
+     a little rock island in the rapids--but I couldn't remember a proper
+     hymn of praise to say.
+
+     There's no getting away from the fact that he's got a will or
+     something, a sort of force different from most of us, or perhaps any
+     of us.  These heathen feel it, and keep their hands off him.  They
+     say he's mad, but they've got great respect for mad people, for they
+     think that God has got their souls above with Him, and that what's
+     left behind on earth is sacred.  He talks to'em, too, like a father
+     in Israel; tells 'em they must stop buying and selling slaves, and
+     that if they don't he will have to punish them!  And I sit holding
+     my sides, for we're only two white men and forty "friendlies"
+     altogether, and two revolvers among us; and I've got the two!  And
+     they listen to his blarneying, and say, "Aiwa, Saadat!  aiwa,
+     Saadat!" as if he had an army of fifty thousand behind him.
+     Sometimes I've sort of hinted that his canoe was carrying a lot of
+     sail; but my! he believes in it all as if there wasn't a spear or a
+     battle-axe or a rifle within a hundred miles of him.  We've been at
+     this for two months now, and a lot of ground we covered till we got
+     here.  I've ridden the gentle camel at the rate of sixty and seventy
+     miles a day--sort of sweeping through the land, making treaties,
+     giving presents, freeing slaves, appointing governors and sheikhs-
+     el-beled, doing it as if we owned the continent.  He mesmerised 'em,
+     simply mesmerised 'em-till we got here.  I don't know what happened
+     then.  Now we're distinctly rating low, the laugh is on us somehow.
+     But he--mind it?  He goes about talking to the sheikhs as though we
+     were all eating off the same corn-cob, and it seems to stupefy them;
+     they don't grasp it.  He goes on arranging for a post here and a
+     station there, and it never occurs to him that it ain't really
+     actual.  He doesn't tell me, and I don't ask him, for I came along
+     to wipe his stirrups, so to speak.  I put my money on him, and I'm
+     not going to worry him.  He's so dead certain in what he does, and
+     what he is, that I don't lose any sleep guessing about him.  It will
+     be funny if we do win out on this proposition--funnier than
+     anything.
+
+     Now, there's one curious thing about it all which ought to be
+     whispered, for I'm only guessing, and I'm not a good guesser; I
+     guessed too much in Mexico about three railways and two silvermines.
+     The first two days after we came here, everything was all right.
+     Then there came an Egyptian, Halim Bey, with a handful of niggers
+     from Cairo, and letters for Claridge Pasha.
+
+     From that minute there was trouble.  I figure it out this way: Halim
+     was sent by Nahoum Pasha to bring letters that said one thing to the
+     Saadat, and, when quite convenient, to say other things to Mustafa,
+     the boss-sheikh of this settlement.  Halim Bey has gone again, but
+     he has left his tale behind him.  I'd stake all I lost, and more
+     than I ever expect to get out of Mexico on that, and maybe I'll get
+     a hatful out of Mexico yet.  I had some good mining propositions
+     down there.  The Saadat believes in Nahoum, and has made Nahoum what
+     he is; and on the surface Nahoum pretends to help him; but he is
+     running underground all the time.  I'd like to help give him a villa
+     at Fazougli.  When the Saadat was in England there was a bad time in
+     Egypt.  I was in Cairo; I know.  It was the same bad old game--the
+     corvee, the kourbash, conscription, a war manufactured to fill the
+     pockets of a few, while the poor starved and died.  It didn't come
+     off, because the Saadat wasn't gone long enough, and he stopped it
+     when he came back.  But Nahoumhe laid the blame on others, and the
+     Saadat took his word for it, and, instead of a war, there came this
+     expedition of his own.
+
+     Ten days later.--Things have happened.  First, there's been awful
+     sickness among the natives, and the Saadat has had his chance.  His
+     medicine-chest was loaded, he had a special camel for it--and he has
+     fired it off.  Night and day he has worked, never resting, never
+     sleeping, curing most, burying a few.  He looks like a ghost now,
+     but it's no use saying or doing anything.  He says: "Sink your own
+     will; let it be subject to a higher, and you need take no thought."
+     It's eating away his life and strength, but it has given us our
+     return tickets, I guess.  They hang about him as if he was Moses in
+     the wilderness smiting the rock.  It's his luck.  Just when I get
+     scared to death, and run down and want a tonic, and it looks as if
+     there'd be no need to put out next week's washing, then his luck
+     steps in, and we get another run.  But it takes a heap out of a man,
+     getting scared.  Whenever I look on a lot of green trees and cattle
+     and horses, and the sun, to say nothing of women and children, and
+     listen to music, or feel a horse eating up the ground under me, 2.10
+     in the sand, I hate to think of leaving it, and I try to prevent it.
+     Besides, I don't like the proposition of going, I don't know where.
+     That's why I get seared.  But he says that it's no more than turning
+     down the light and turning it up again.  They used to call me a
+     dreamer in Mexico, because I kept seeing things that no one else had
+     thought of, and laid out railways and tapped mines for the future;
+     but I was nothing to him.  I'm a high-and-dry hedge-clipper
+     alongside.  I'm betting on him all the time; but no one seems to be
+     working to make his dreams come true, except himself.  I don't
+     count; I'm no good, no real good.  I'm only fit to run the
+     commissariat, and see that he gets enough to eat, and has a safe
+     camel, and so on.
+
+     Why doesn't some one else help him?  He's working for humanity.
+     Give him half a chance, and Haroun-al-Raschid won't be in it.  Kaid
+     trusts him, depends on him, stands by him, but doesn't seem to know
+     how to help him when help would do most good.  The Saadat does it
+     all himself; and if it wasn't that the poor devil of a fellah sees
+     what he's doing, and cottons to him, and the dervishes and Arabs
+     feel he's right, he might as well leave.  But it's just there he
+     counts.  There's something about him, something that's Quaker in
+     him, primitive, silent, and perceptive--if that's a real word--which
+     makes them feel that he's honest, and isn't after anything for
+     himself.  Arabs don't talk much; they make each other understand
+     without many words.  They think with all their might on one thing at
+     a time, and they think things into happening--and so does he.  He's
+     a thousand years old, which is about as old-fashioned as I mean, and
+     as wise, and as plain to read as though you'd write the letters of
+     words as big as a date-palm.  That's where he makes the running with
+     them, and they can read their title clear to mansions in the skies!
+
+     You should hear him talk with Ebn Ezra Bey--perhaps you don't know
+     of Ezra?  He was a friend of his Uncle Benn, and brought the news of
+     his massacre to England, and came back with the Saadat.  Well, three
+     days ago Ebn Ezra came, and there came with him, too, Halim Bey, the
+     Egyptian, who had brought the letters to us from Cairo.  Elm Ezra
+     found him down the river deserted by his niggers, and sick with this
+     new sort of fever, which the Saadat is knocking out of time.  And
+     there he lies, the Saadat caring for him as though he was his
+     brother.  But that's his way; though, now I come to think of it, the
+     Saadat doesn't suspect what I suspect, that Halim Bey brought word
+     from Nahoum to our sheikhs here to keep us here, or lose us, or do
+     away with us.  Old Ebn Ezra doesn't say much himself, doesn't say
+     anything about that; but he's guessing the same as me.  And the
+     Saadat looks as though he was ready for his grave, but keeps going,
+     going, going.  He never seems to sleep.  What keeps him alive I
+     don't know.  Sometimes I feel clean knocked out myself with the
+     little I do, but he's a travelling hospital all by his lonesome.
+
+     Later.--I had to stop writing, for things have been going on--
+     several.  I can see that Ebn Ezra has told the Saadat things that
+     make him want to get away to Cairo as soon as possible.  That it's
+     Nahoum Pasha and others--oh, plenty of others, of course--I'm
+     certain; but what the particular game is I don't know.  Perhaps you
+     know over in England, for you're nearer Cairo than we are by a few
+     miles, and you've got the telegraph.  Perhaps there's a revolution,
+     perhaps there's been a massacre of Europeans, perhaps Turkey is
+     kicking up a dust, perhaps Europe is interfering--all of it, all at
+     once.
+
+     Later still.--I've found out it's a little of all, and the Saadat is
+     ready to go.  I guess he can go now pretty soon, for the worst of
+     the fever is over.  But something has happened that's upset him-
+     knocked him stony for a minute.  Halim Bey was killed last night--by
+     order of the sheikhs, I'm told; but the sheikhs won't give it away.
+     When the Saadat went to them, his eyes blazing, his face pale as a
+     sheet, and as good as swore at them, and treated them as though he'd
+     string them up the next minute, they only put their hands on their
+     heads, and said they were "the fallen leaves for his foot to
+     scatter," the "snow on the hill for his breath to melt"; but they
+     wouldn't give him any satisfaction.  So he came back and shut
+     himself up in his tent, and he sits there like a ghost all
+     shrivelled up for want of sleep, and his eyes like a lime-kiln
+     burning; for now he knows this at least, that Halim Bey had brought
+     some word from Kaid's Palace that set these Arabs against him, and
+     nearly stopped my correspondence.  You see, there's a widow in
+     Cairo--she's a sister of the American consul, and I've promised to
+     take her with a party camping in the Fayoum--cute as she can be, and
+     plays the guitar.  But it's all right now, except that the Saadat is
+     running too close and fine.  If he has any real friends in England
+     among the Government people, or among those who can make the
+     Government people sit up, and think what's coming to Egypt and to
+     him, they'll help him now when he needs it.  He'll need help real
+     bad when he gets back to Cairo--if we get that far.  It isn't yet a
+     sure thing, for we've got to fight in the next day or two--I forgot
+     to tell you that sooner.  There's a bull-Arab on the rampage with
+     five thousand men, and he's got a claim out on our sheikh, Mustafa,
+     for ivory he has here, and there's going to be a scrimmage.  We've
+     got to make for a better position to-morrow, and meet Abdullah, the
+     bull-Arab, further down the river.  That's one reason why Mustafa
+     and all our friends here are so sweet on us now.  They look on the
+     Saadat as a kind of mascot, and they think that he can wipe out the
+     enemy with his flute, which they believe is a witch-stick to work
+     wonders.
+
+     He's just sent for me to come, and I must stop soon.  Say, he hasn't
+     had sleep for a fortnight.  It's too much; he can't stand it.  I
+     tried it, and couldn't.  It wore me down.  He's killing himself for
+     others.  I can't manage him; but I guess you could.  I apologise,
+     dear Lady Cousin.  I'm only a hayseed, and a failure, but I guess
+     you'll understand that I haven't thought only of myself as I wrote
+     this letter.  The higher you go in life the more you'll understand;
+     that's your nature.  I'll get this letter off by a nigger to-morrow,
+     with those the Saadat is sending through to Cairo by some
+     friendlies.  It's only a chance; but everything's chance here now.
+     Anyhow, it's safer than leaving it till the scrimmage.  If you get
+     this, won't you try and make the British Government stand by the
+     Saadat?  Your husband, the lord, could pull it off, if he tried; and
+     if you ask him, I guess he'd try.  I must be off now.  David Pasha
+     will be waiting.  Well, give my love to the girls!
+
+               Your affectionate cousin,
+
+                                        TOM LACEY.
+
+     P. S.--I've got a first-class camel for our scrimmage day after
+     to-morrow.  Mustafa sent it to me this morning.  I had a fight on
+     mules once, down at Oaxaca, but that was child's play.  This will be
+     "slaughter in the pan," if the Saadat doesn't stop it somehow.
+     Perhaps he will.  If I wasn't so scared I'd wish he couldn't stop
+     it, for it will be a way-up Barbarian scrap, the tongs and the
+     kettle, a bully panjandrum.  It gets mighty dull in the desert when
+     you're not moving.  But "it makes to think," as the French say.
+     Since I came out here I've had several real centre thoughts, sort of
+     main principles-key-thoughts, that's it.  What I want now is a sort
+     of safety-ring to string 'em on and keep 'em safe; for I haven't a
+     good memory, and I get mighty rattled sometimes.  Thoughts like
+     these are like the secret of a combination lock; they let you into
+     the place where the gold and securities and title-deeds of life are.
+     Trouble is, I haven't got a safety-ring, and I'm certain to lose
+     them.  I haven't got what you'd call an intellectual memory.  Things
+     come in flashes to me out of experiences, and pull me up short, and
+     I say, "Yes, that's it--that's it; I understand."  I see why it's
+     so, and what it means, and where it leads, and how far it spreads.
+     It's five thousand years old.  Adam thought it after Cain killed
+     Abel, or Abel thought it just before he died, or Eve learned it from
+     Lilith, or it struck Abraham when he went to sacrifice Isaac.
+     Sometimes things hit me deep like that here in the desert.  Then I
+     feel I can see just over on the horizon the tents of Moab in the
+     wilderness; that yesterday and to-day are the same; that I've
+     crossed the prairies of the everlasting years, and am playing about
+     with Ishmael in the wild hills, or fighting with Ahab.  Then the
+     world and time seem pretty small potatoes.
+
+     You see how it is.  I never was trained to think, and I get stunned
+     by thoughts that strike me as being dug right out of the centre.
+     Sometimes I'd like to write them down; but I can't write; I can only
+     talk as I'm talking to you.  If you weren't so high up, and so much
+     cleverer than I am, and such a thinker, I'd like you to be my
+     safety-ring, if you would.  I could tell the key-thoughts to you
+     when they came to me, before I forgot them with all their bearings;
+     and by-and-by they'd do me a lot of good when I got away from this
+     influence, and back into the machinery of the Western world again.
+     If you could come out here, if you could feel what I feel here--and
+     you would feel a thousand times as much--I don't know what you
+     wouldn't do.
+
+     It's pretty wonderful.  The nights with the stars so white and
+     glittering, and so near that you'd think you could reach up and hand
+     them down; the dark, deep, blue beyond; such a width of life all
+     round you, a sort of never-ending space, that everything you ever
+     saw or did seems little, and God so great in a kind of hovering
+     sense like a pair of wings; and all the secrets of time coming out
+     of it all, and sort of touching your face like a velvet wind.  I
+     expect you'll think me sentimental, a first-class squash out of the
+     pumpkin-garden; but it's in the desert, and it gets into you and
+     saturates you, till you feel that this is a kind of middle space
+     between the world of cities, and factories, and railways, and
+     tenement-houses, and the quiet world to come--a place where they
+     think out things for the benefit of future generations, and convey
+     them through incarnations, or through the desert.  Say, your
+     ladyship, I'm a chatterer, I'm a two-cent philosopher, I'm a baby;
+     but you are too much like your grandmother, who was the daughter of
+     a Quaker like David Pasha, to laugh at me.
+
+     I've got a suit of fine chain-armour which I bought of an Arab down
+     by Darfur.  I'm wondering if it would be too cowardly to wear it in
+     the scrap that's coming.  I don't know, though, but what I'll wear
+     it, I get so scared.  But it will be a frightful hot thing under my
+     clothes, and it's hot enough without that, so I'm not sure.  It
+     depends how much my teeth chatter when I see "the dawn of battle."
+
+     I've got one more thing before I stop.  I'm going to send you a
+     piece of poetry which the Saadat wrote, and tore in two, and threw
+     away.  He was working off his imagination, I guess, as you have to
+     do out here.  I collected it and copied it, and put in the
+     punctuation--he didn't bother about that.  Perhaps he can't
+     punctuate.  I don't understand quite what the poetry means, but
+     maybe you will.  Anyway, you'll see that it's a real desert piece.
+     Here it is:
+
+
+                         "THE DESERT ROAD
+
+              "In the sands I lived in a hut of palm,
+               There was never a garden to see;
+               There was never a path through the desert calm,
+               Nor a way through its storms for me.
+
+              "Tenant was I of a lone domain;
+               The far pale caravans wound
+               To the rim of the sky, and vanished again;
+               My call in the waste was drowned.
+
+              "The vultures came and hovered and fled;
+               And once there stole to my door
+               A white gazelle, but its eyes were dread
+               With the hurt of the wounds it bore.
+
+              "It passed in the dusk with a foot of fear,
+               And the white cold mists rolled in;
+
+               "And my heart was the heart of a stricken deer,
+               Of a soul in the snare of sin.
+
+              "My days they withered like rootless things,
+               And the sands rolled on, rolled wide;
+               Like a pelican I, with broken wings,
+               Like a drifting barque on the tide.
+
+              "But at last, in the light of a rose-red day,
+               In the windless glow of the morn,
+               From over the hills and from far away,
+               You came--ah, the joy of the morn!
+
+              "And wherever your footsteps fell, there crept
+               A path--it was fair and wide:
+               A desert road which no sands have swept,
+               Where never a hope has died.
+
+              "I followed you forth, and your beauty held
+               My heart like an ancient song;
+               By that desert road to the blossoming plains
+               I came-and the way was long!
+
+              "So I set my course by the light of your eyes;
+               I care not what fate may send;
+               On the road I tread shine the love-starred skies--
+               The road with never an end."
+
+     Not many men can do things like that, and the other things, too,
+     that he does.  Perhaps he will win through, by himself, but is it
+     fair to have him run the risk?  If he ever did you a good turn, as
+     you once said to me he did, won't you help him now?  You are on the
+     inside of political things, and if you make up your mind to help,
+     nothing will stop you--that was your grandmother's way.  He ought to
+     get his backing pretty soon, or it won't be any good.  .  .  .  I
+     hear him at his flute.  I expect he's tired waiting for me.  Well,
+     give my love to the girls!
+                                                  T.  L.
+
+
+As Hylda read, she passed through phases of feeling begotten of new
+understanding which shook her composure.  She had seen David and all that
+David was doing; Egypt, and all that was threatening the land through the
+eyes of another who told the whole truth--except about his own cowardice,
+which was untrue.  She felt the issues at stake.  While the mention of
+David's personal danger left her sick for a moment, she saw the wider
+peril also to the work he had set out to do.
+
+What was the thing without the man?  It could not exist--it had no
+meaning.  Where was he now?  What had been the end of the battle?  He had
+saved others, had he saved himself?  The most charmed life must be
+pierced by the shaft of doom sooner or later; but he was little more than
+a youth yet, he had only just begun!
+
+"And the Saadat looks as though he was ready for his grave--but keeps
+going, going, going.!"  The words kept ringing in her ears.  Again: "And
+he sits there like a ghost all shrivelled up for want of sleep, and his
+eyes like a lime-kiln burning.  .  .  .  He hasn't had sleep for a
+fortnight.  .  .  .  He's killing himself for others."
+
+Her own eyes were shining with a dry, hot light, her lips were quivering,
+but her hands upon the letter were steady and firm.  What could she do?
+
+She went to a table, picked up the papers, and scanned them hurriedly.
+Not a word about Egypt.  She thought for a moment, then left the drawing-
+room.  Passing up a flight of stairs to her husband's study, she knocked
+and entered.  It was empty; but Eglington was in the house, for a red
+despatch-box lay open on his table.  Instinctively she glanced at the
+papers exposed in the box, and at the letters beside it.  The document on
+the top of the pile in the box related to Cyprus--the name caught her
+eye.  Another document was half-exposed beneath it.  Her hand went to her
+heart.  She saw the words, "Soudan" and "Claridge Pasha."  She reached
+for it, then drew back her hand, and her eyes closed as though to shut it
+out from her sight.  Why should she not see it?  They were her husband's
+papers, husband and wife were one.  Husband and wife one!  She shrank
+back.  Were they one?  An overmastering desire was on her.  It seemed
+terrible to wait, when here before her was news of David, of life or
+death.  Suddenly she put out her hand and drew the Cyprus paper over the
+Egyptian document, so that she might not see it.
+
+As she did so the door opened on her, and Eglington entered.  He had seen
+the swift motion of her hand, and again a look peculiar to him crossed
+his face, enigmatical, cynical, not pleasant to see.
+
+She turned on him slowly, and he was aware of her inward distress to some
+degree, though her face was ruled to quietness.
+
+He nodded at her and smiled.  She shrank, for she saw in his nod and his
+smile that suggestion of knowing all about everything and everybody, and
+thinking the worst, which had chilled her so often.  Even in their short
+married life it had chilled those confidences which she would gladly have
+poured out before him, if he had been a man with an open soul.  Had there
+been joined to his intellect and temperament a heart capable of true
+convictions and abiding love, what a man he might have been!  But his
+intellect was superficial, and his temperament was dangerous, because
+there were not the experiences of a soul of truth to give the deeper hold
+upon the meaning of life.  She shrank now, as, with a little laugh and
+glancing suggestively at the despatch-box, he said:
+
+"And what do you think of it all?"
+
+She felt as though something was crushing her heart within its grasp, and
+her eyes took on a new look of pain.  "I did not read the papers," she
+answered quietly.
+
+"I saw them in your fingers.  What creatures women are--so dishonourable
+in little things," he said ironically.
+
+She laid a hand on his.  "I did not read them, Harry," she urged.
+
+He smiled and patted her arm.  "There, there, it doesn't matter," he
+laughed.  He watched her narrowly.  "It matters greatly," she answered
+gently, though his words had cut her like a knife.  "I did not read the
+papers.  I only saw the word 'Cyprus' on the first paper, and I pushed it
+over the paper which had the word 'Egypt' on it 'Egypt' and 'Claridge,'
+lest I should read it.  I did not wish to read it.  I am not
+dishonourable, Harry."
+
+He had hurt her more than he had ever done; and only the great matter
+at stake had prevented the lesser part of her from bursting forth in
+indignation, from saying things which she did not wish to say.  She had
+given him devotion--such devotion, such self-effacement in his career as
+few women ever gave.  Her wealth--that was so little in comparison with
+the richness of her nature--had been his; and yet his vast egotism took
+it all as his right, and she was repaid in a kind of tyranny, the more
+galling and cruel because it was wielded by a man of intellect and
+culture, and ancient name and tradition.  If he had been warned that
+he was losing his wife's love, he would have scouted the idea, his self-
+assurance was so strong, his vanity complete.  If, however, he had been
+told that another man was thinking of his wife, he would have believed
+it, as he believed now that David had done; and he cherished that belief,
+and let resentment grow.  He was the Earl of Eglington, and no matter
+what reputation David had reached, he was still a member of a Quaker
+trader's family, with an origin slightly touched with scandal.  Another
+resentment, however, was steadily rising in him.  It galled him that
+Hylda should take so powerful an interest in David's work in Egypt; and
+he knew now that she had always done so.  It did not ease his vexed
+spirit to know that thousands of others of his fellow-countrymen did the
+same.  They might do so, but she was his wife, and his own work was the
+sun round which her mind and interest should revolve.
+
+"Why should you be so keen about Egypt and Claridge Pasha?" he said to
+her now.
+
+Her face hardened a little.  Had he the right to torture her so?  To
+suspect her?  She could read it in his eyes.  Her conscience was clear.
+She was no man's slave.  She would not be any man's slave.  She was
+master of her own soul.  What right had he to catechise her--as though
+she were a servant or a criminal?  But she checked the answer on her
+tongue, because she was hurt deeper than words could express, and she
+said, composedly:
+
+"I have here a letter from my cousin Lacey, who is with Claridge Pasha.
+It has news of him, of events in the Soudan.  He had fever, there was to
+be a fight, and I wished to know if you had any later news.  I thought
+that document there might contain news, but I did not read it.  I
+realised that it was not yours, that it belonged to the Government, that
+I had no right.  Perhaps you will tell me if you have news.  Will you?"
+She leaned against the table wearily, holding her letter.
+
+"Let me read your letter first," he said wilfully.
+
+A mist seemed to come before her eyes; but she was schooled to self-
+command, and he did not see he had given her a shock.  Her first impulse
+was to hand the letter over at once; then there came the remembrance of
+all it contained, all it suggested.  Would he see all it suggested?  She
+recalled the words Lacey had used regarding a service which David had
+once done her.  If Eglington asked, what could she say?  It was not her
+secret alone, it was another's.  Would she have the right, even if she
+wished it, to tell the truth, or part of the truth?  Or, would she be
+entitled to relate some immaterial incident which would evade the real
+truth?  What good could it do to tell the dark story?  What could it
+serve?  Eglington would horribly misunderstand it--that she knew.  There
+were the verses also.  They were more suggestive than anything else,
+though, indeed, they might have referred to another woman, or were merely
+impersonal; but she felt that was not so.  And there was Eglington's
+innate unbelief in man and woman!  Her first impulse held, however.  She
+would act honestly.  She would face whatever there was to face.  She
+would not shelter herself; she would not give him the right in the future
+to say she had not dealt fairly by him, had evaded any inquest of her
+life or mind which he might make.
+
+She gave him the letter, her heart standing still, but she was filled
+with a regnant determination to defend herself, to defend David against
+any attack, or from any consequences.
+
+All her life and hopes seemed hanging in the balance, as he began to read
+the letter.  With fear she saw his face cloud over, heard an impatient
+exclamation pass his lips.  She closed her eyes to gather strength for
+the conflict which was upon her.  He spoke, and she vaguely wondered what
+passage in the letter had fixed his attention.  His voice seemed very far
+away.  She scarcely understood.  But presently it pierced the clouds of
+numbness between them, and she realised what he was saying:
+
+"Vulgar fellow--I can't congratulate you upon your American cousin.  So,
+the Saadat is great on moral suasion, master of it--never failed yet--not
+altogether--and Aunt Melissa and skim-milk and early piety!'  And 'the
+Saadat is a wonder from Wondertown'--like a side-show to a circus, a
+marvel on the flying trapeze!  Perhaps you can give me the sense of the
+letter, if there is any sense in it.  I can't read his writing, and it
+seems interminable.  Would you mind?"
+
+A sigh of relief broke from her.  A weight slipped away from her heart
+and brain.  It was as though one in armour awaited the impact of a heavy,
+cruel, overwhelming foe, who suddenly disappeared, and the armour fell
+from the shoulders, and breath came easily once again.
+
+"Would you mind?" he repeated drily, as he folded up the letter slowly.
+
+He handed it back to her, the note of sarcasm in his voice pricking her
+like the point of a dagger.  She felt angered with herself that he could
+rouse her temper by such small mean irony.  She had a sense of bitter
+disappointment in him--or was it a deep hurt?--that she had not made him
+love her, truly love her.  If he had only meant the love that he swore
+before they had married!  Why had he deceived her?  It had all been in
+his hands, her fate and future; but almost before the bridal flowers had
+faded, she had come to know two bitter things: that he had married with a
+sordid mind; that he was incapable of the love which transmutes the half-
+comprehending, half-developed affection of the maid into the absorbing,
+understanding, beautiful passion of the woman.  She had married not
+knowing what love and passion were; uncomprehending, and innocent because
+uncomprehending; with a fine affection, but capable of loving wholly.
+One thing had purified her motives and her life--the desire to share with
+Eglington his public duty and private hopes, to be his confidante, his
+friend, his coadjutor, proud of him, eager for him, determined to help
+him.  But he had blocked the path to all inner companionship.  He did no
+more than let her share the obvious and outer responsibilities of his
+life.  From the vital things, if there were vital things, she was shut
+out.  What would she not give for one day of simple tenderness and quiet
+affection, a true day with a true love!
+
+She was now perfectly composed.  She told him the substance of the
+letter, of David's plight, of the fever, of the intended fight, of Nahoum
+Pasha, of the peril to David's work.  He continued to interrogate her,
+while she could have shrieked out the question, "What is in yonder
+document?  What do you know?  Have you news of his safety?"  Would he
+never stop his questioning?  It was trying her strength and patience
+beyond endurance.  At last he drew the document slowly from the despatch-
+box, and glanced up and down it musingly.  "I fancy he won the battle,"
+he said slowly, "for they have news of him much farther down the river.
+But from this letter I take it he is not yet within the zone of safety--
+so Nahoum Pasha says."  He flicked the document upwards with his thumb.
+
+"What is our Government doing to help him?" she asked, checking her
+eagerness.
+
+His heart had gradually hardened towards Egypt.  Power had emphasised
+a certain smallness in him.  Personal considerations informed the policy
+of the moment.  He was not going to be dragged at the chariot-wheels of
+the Quaker.  To be passive, when David in Egypt had asked for active
+interest; to delay, when urgency was important to Claridge Pasha; to
+speak coldly on Egyptian affairs to his chief, the weak Foreign
+Secretary, this was the policy he had begun.
+
+So he answered now: "It is the duty of the Egyptian Government to help
+him--of Prince Kaid, of Nahoum Pasha, who is acting for him in his
+absence, who governs finance, and therefore the army.  Egypt does not
+belong to England."
+
+"Nahoum Pasha is his enemy.  He will do nothing to help, unless you force
+him."
+
+"Why do you say that?"
+
+"Because I know Nahoum Pasha."
+
+"When did you know Nahoum?"
+
+"In Egypt, years ago."
+
+"Your acquaintance is more varied than I thought," he said sarcastically.
+
+"Oh, do not speak to me like that!" she returned, in a low, indignant
+voice.
+
+"Do not patronise me; do not be sarcastic."
+
+"Do not be so sensitive," he answered unemotionally.
+
+"You surely do not mean that you--that the Government will not help him?
+He is doing the work of Europe, of civilisation, of Christianity there.
+He is sacrificing himself for the world.  Do you not see it?  Oh, but you
+do!  You would realise his work if you knew Egypt as I have seen it."
+
+"Expediency must govern the policy of nations," he answered critically.
+
+"But, if through your expediency he is killed like a rat in a trap, and
+his work goes to pieces--all undone!  Is there no right in the matter?"
+
+"In affairs of state other circumstances than absolute 'right' enter.
+Here and there the individual is sacrificed who otherwise would be saved
+--if it were expedient."
+
+"Oh, Eglington!  He is of your own county, of your own village, is your
+neighbour, a man of whom all England should be proud.  You can intervene
+if you will be just, and say you will.  I know that intervention has been
+discussed in the Cabinet."
+
+"You say he is of my county.  So are many people, and yet they are not
+county people.  A neighbour he was, but more in a Scriptural than social
+sense."  He was hurting her purposely.
+
+She made a protesting motion of her hand.  "No, no, no, do not be so
+small.  This is a great matter.  Do a great thing now; help it to be done
+for your own honour, for England's honour--for a good man's sake, for
+your country's sake."
+
+There came a knock at the door.  An instant afterwards a secretary
+entered.  "A message from the Prime Minister, sir."  He handed over a
+paper.
+
+"Will you excuse me?" he asked Hylda suavely, in his eyes the
+enigmatical look that had chilled her so often before.  She felt that her
+appeal had been useless.  She prepared to leave the room.  He took her
+hand, kissed it gallantly, and showed her out.  It was his way--too civil
+to be real.
+
+Blindly she made her way to her room.  Inside, she suddenly swayed and
+sank fainting to the ground, as Kate Heaver ran forward to her.  Kate saw
+the letter in the clinched hand.  Loosening it, she read two or three
+sentences with a gasp.  They contained Tom Lacey's appeal for David.  She
+lifted Hylda's head to her shoulder with endearing words, and chafed the
+cold hands, murmuring to herself the while.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+THE QUESTIONER
+
+"What has thee come to say?"
+
+Sitting in his high-backed chair, Luke Claridge seemed a part of its
+dignified severity.  In the sparsely furnished room with its uncarpeted
+floor, its plain teak table, its high wainscoting and undecorated walls,
+the old man had the look of one who belonged to some ancient consistory,
+a judge whose piety would march with an austerity that would save a human
+soul by destroying the body, if need be.
+
+A crisis had come, vaguely foreseen, sombrely eluded.  A questioner was
+before him who, poor, unheeded, an ancient victim of vice, could yet
+wield a weapon whose sweep of wounds would be wide.  Stern and masterful
+as he looked in his arid isolation, beneath all was a shaking anxiety.
+
+He knew well what the old chair-maker had come to say, but, in the
+prologue of the struggle before him, he was unwittingly manoeuvring for
+position.
+
+"Speak," he added presently, as Soolsby fumbled in his great loose
+pockets, and drew forth a paper.  "What has thee to say?"
+
+Without a word, Soolsby handed over the paper, but the other would not
+take it.
+
+"What is it?" he asked, his lips growing pale.  "Read--if thee can
+read."
+
+The gibe in the last words made the colour leap into Soolsby's face, and
+a fighting look came.  He too had staved off this inevitable hour, had
+dreaded it, but now his courage shot up high.
+
+"Doost think I have forgotten how to read since the day I put my hand to
+a writing you've hid so long from them it most concerns?  Ay, I can read,
+and I can write, and I will prove that I can speak too before I've done."
+
+"Read--read," rejoined the old man hoarsely, his hands tightly gripping
+the chair-arm.
+
+"The fever caught him at Shendy--that is the place--"
+
+"He is not dead--David is not dead?" came the sharp, pained
+interruption.  The old man's head strained forward, his eyes were misty
+and dazed.
+
+Soolsby's face showed no pity for the other's anxiety; it had a kind of
+triumph in it.  "Nay, he is living," he answered.  "He got well of the
+fever, and came to Cairo, but he's off again into the desert.  It's the
+third time.  You can't be tempting Providence for ever.  This paper here
+says it's too big a job for one man--like throwing a good life away.
+Here in England is his place, it says.  And so say I; and so I have come
+to say, and to hear you say so, too.  What is he there?  One man against
+a million.  What put it in his head that he thinks he can do it?"
+
+His voice became lower; he fixed his eyes meaningly on the other.  "When
+a man's life got a twist at the start, no wonder it flies off madlike to
+do the thing that isn't to be done, and leave undone the thing that's
+here for it to do.  Doost think a straight line could come from the
+crooked line you drew for him?"
+
+"He is safe--he is well and strong again?" asked the old man painfully.
+Suddenly he reached out a hand for the paper.  "Let me read," he said, in
+a voice scarce above a whisper.
+
+He essayed to take the paper calmly, but it trembled in his hands.  He
+spread it out and fumbled for his glasses, but could not find them, and
+he gazed helplessly at the page before him.  Soolsby took the paper from
+him and read slowly:
+
+".  .  .  Claridge Pasha has done good work in Egypt, but he is a
+generation too soon, it may be two or three too soon.  We can but regard
+this fresh enterprise as a temptation to Fate to take from our race one
+of the most promising spirits and vital personalities which this
+generation has produced.  It is a forlorn hope.  Most Englishmen familiar
+with Claridge Pasha's life and aims will ask--"
+
+An exclamation broke from the old man.  In the pause which followed he
+said: "It was none of my doing.  He went to Egypt against my will."
+
+"Ay, so many a man's said that's not wanted to look his own acts straight
+in the face.  If Our Man had been started different, if he'd started in
+the path where God A'mighty dropped him, and not in the path Luke
+Claridge chose, would he have been in Egypt to-day wearing out his life?
+He's not making carpets there, he's only beating them."
+
+The homely illustration drawn from the business in which he had been
+interested so many years went home to Claridge's mind.  He shrank back,
+and sat rigid, his brows drawing over the eyes, till they seemed sunk in
+caverns of the head.  Suddenly Soolsby's voice rose angrily.  Luke
+Claridge seemed so remorseless and unyielding, so set in his vanity and
+self-will!  Soolsby misread the rigid look in the face, the pale
+sternness.  He did not know that there had suddenly come upon Luke
+Claridge the full consciousness of an agonising truth--that all he had
+done where David was concerned had been a mistake.  The hard look, the
+sternness, were the signals of a soul challenging itself.
+
+"Ay, you've had your own will," cried Soolsby mercilessly.  "You've said
+to God A'mighty that He wasn't able to work out to a good end what He'd
+let happen; and so you'd do His work for Him.  You kept the lad hid away
+from the people that belonged to him, you kept him out of his own, and
+let others take his birthright.  You put a shame upon him, hiding who his
+father and his father's people were, and you put a shame upon her that
+lies in the graveyard--as sweet a lass, as good, as ever lived on earth.
+Ay, a shame and a scandal!  For your eyes were shut always to the
+sidelong looks, your ears never heard the things people said--'A good-
+for-nothing ship-captain, a scamp and a ne'er-do-weel, one that had a
+lass at every port, and, maybe, wives too; one that none knew or ever had
+seen--a pirate maybe, or a slave-dealer, or a jail-bird, for all they
+knew!  Married--oh yes, married right enough, but nothing else--not even
+a home.  Just a ring on the finger, and then, beyond and away!'  Around
+her life that brought into the world our lad yonder you let a cloud draw
+down; and you let it draw round his, too, for he didn't even bear his
+father's name--much less knew who his father was--or live in his father's
+home, or come by his own in the end.  You gave the lad shame and scandal.
+Do you think, he didn't feel it, was it much or little?  He wasn't
+walking in the sun, but--"
+
+"Mercy!  Mercy!" broke in the old man, his hand before his eyes.  He was
+thinking of Mercy, his daughter, of the words she had said to him when
+she died, "Set him in the sun, father, where God can find him," and her
+name now broke from his lips.
+
+Soolsby misunderstood.  "Ay, there'll be mercy when right's been done
+Our Man, and not till then.  I've held my tongue for half a lifetime, but
+I'll speak now and bring him back.  Ay, he shall come back and take the
+place that is his, and all that belongs to him.  That lordship yonder--
+let him go out into the world and make his place as the Egyptian did.
+He's had his chance to help Our Man, and he has only hurt, not helped
+him.  We've had enough of his second-best lordship and his ways."
+
+The old man's face was painful in its stricken stillness now.  He had
+regained control of himself, his brain had recovered greatly from its
+first suffusion of excitement.
+
+"How does thee know my lord yonder has hurt and not helped him?" he
+asked in an even voice, his lips tightening, however.  "How does thee
+know it surely?"
+
+"From Kate Heaver, my lady's maid.  My lady's illness--what was it?
+Because she would help Our Man, and, out of his hatred, yonder second son
+said that to her which no woman can bear that's a true woman; and then,
+what with a chill and fever, she's been yonder ailing these weeks past.
+She did what she could for him, and her husband did what he could against
+him."
+
+The old man settled back in his chair again.  "Thee has kept silent all
+these years?  Thee has never told any that lives?"
+
+"I gave my word to her that died--to our Egyptian's mother--that I would
+never speak unless you gave me leave to speak, or if you should die
+before me.  It was but a day before the lad was born.  So have I kept my
+word.  But now you shall speak.  Ay, then, but you shall speak, or I'll
+break my word to her, to do right by her son.  She herself would speak if
+she was here, and I'll answer her, if ever I see her after Purgatory, for
+speaking now."
+
+The old man drew himself up in his chair as though in pain, and said very
+slowly, almost thickly: "I shall answer also for all I did.  The spirit
+moved me.  He is of my blood--his mother was dead--in his veins is
+the blood that runs in mine.  His father--aristocrat, spendthrift,
+adventurer, renegade, who married her in secret, and left her, bidding
+her return to me, until he came again, and she to bear him a child--was
+he fit to bring up the boy?"
+
+He breathed heavily, his face became wan and haggard, as he continued:
+"Restless on land or sea, for ever seeking some new thing, and when he
+found it, and saw what was therein, he turned away forgetful.  God put it
+into my heart to abjure him and the life around him.  The Voice made me
+rescue the child from a life empty and bare and heartless and proud.
+When he returned, and my child was in her grave, he came to me in secret;
+he claimed the child of that honest lass whom he had married under a
+false name.  I held my hand lest I should kill him, man of peace as I am.
+Even his father--Quaker though he once became--did we not know ere the
+end that he had no part or lot with us, that he but experimented with his
+soul, as with all else?  Experiment--experiment--experiment, until at
+last an Eglington went exploring in my child's heart, and sent her to her
+grave--the God of Israel be her rest and refuge!  What should such high-
+placed folk do stooping out of their sphere to us who walk in plain
+paths?  What have we in common with them?  My soul would have none of
+them--masks of men, the slaves of riches and titles, and tyrants over the
+poor."
+
+His voice grew hoarse and high, and his head bent forward.  He spoke as
+though forgetful of Soolsby's presence: "As the East is from the West, so
+were we separate from these lovers of this world, the self-indulgent, the
+hard-hearted, the proud.  I chose for the child that he should stay with
+me and not go to him, to remain among his own people and his own class.
+He was a sinister, an evil man.  Was the child to be trusted with him?"
+
+"The child was his own child," broke in Soolsby.  "Your daughter was his
+lady--the Countess of Eglington!  Not all the Quakers in heaven or earth
+could alter that.  His first-born son is Earl of Eglington, and has been
+so these years past; and you, nor his second-best lordship there, nor all
+the courts in England can alter that.  .  .  .  Ay, I've kept my peace,
+but I will speak out now.  I was with the Earl--James Fetherdon he called
+himself--when he married her that's gone to heaven, if any ever went to
+heaven; and I can prove all.  There's proof aplenty, and 'tis a pity, ay,
+God's pity!  that 'twas not used long ago.  Well I knew, as the years
+passed, that the Earl's heart was with David, but he had not the courage
+to face it all, so worn away was the man in him.  Ah, if the lad had
+always been with him--who can tell?--he might have been different!
+Whether so or not, it was the lad's right to take his place his mother
+gave him, let be whatever his father was.  'Twas a cruel thing done to
+him.  His own was his own, to run his race as God A'mighty had laid the
+hurdles, not as Luke Claridge willed.  I'm sick of seeing yonder fellow
+in Our Man's place, he that will not give him help, when he may; he that
+would see him die like a dog in the desert, brother or no brother--"
+
+"He does not know--Lord Eglington does not know the truth?" interposed
+the old man in a heavy whisper.  "He does not know, but, if he knew,
+would it matter to him!  So much the more would he see Our Man die yonder
+in the sands.  I know the breed.  I know him yonder, the skim-milk lord.
+There is no blood of justice, no milk of kindness in him.  Do you think
+his father that I friended in this thing--did he ever give me a penny,
+or aught save that hut on the hill that was not worth a pound a year?
+Did he ever do aught to show that he remembered?--Like father like son.
+I wanted naught.  I held my peace, not for him, but for her--for the
+promise I made her when she smiled at me and said: 'If I shouldn't be
+seeing thee again, Soolsby, remember; and if thee can ever prove a friend
+to the child that is to be, prove it.'  And I will prove it now.  He must
+come back to his own.  Right's right, and I will have it so.  More brains
+you may have, and wealth you have, but not more common sense than any
+common man like me.  If the spirit moved you to hold your peace, it moves
+me to make you speak.  With all your meek face you've been a hard, stiff-
+necked man, a tyrant too, and as much an aristocrat to such as me as any
+lord in the land.  But I've drunk the mug of silence to the bottom.
+I've--" He stopped short, seeing a strange look come over the other's
+face, then stepped forward quickly as the old man half rose from his
+chair, murmuring thickly:
+
+"Mercy--David, my lord, come--!" he muttered, and staggered, and fell
+into Soolsby's arms.
+
+His head dropped forward on his breast, and with a great sigh he sank
+into unconsciousness.  Soolsby laid him on a couch, and ran to the door
+and called aloud for help.
+
+                    ..........................
+
+The man of silence was silent indeed now.  In the room where paralysis
+had fallen on him a bed was brought, and he lay nerveless on the verge of
+a still deeper silence.  The hours went by.  His eyes opened, he saw and
+recognised them all, but his look rested only on Faith and Soolsby; and,
+as time went on, these were the only faces to which he gave an answering
+look of understanding.  Days wore away, but he neither spoke nor moved.
+
+People came and went softly, and he gave no heed.  There was ever a
+trouble in his eyes when they were open.  Only when Soolsby came did it
+seem to lessen.  Faith saw this, and urged Soolsby to sit by him.  She
+had questioned much concerning what had happened before the stroke fell,
+but Soolsby said only that the old man had been greatly troubled about
+David.  Once Lady Eglington, frail and gentle and sympathetic, came, but
+the trouble deepened in his eyes, and the lids closed over them, so that
+he might not see her face.
+
+When she had gone, Soolsby, who had been present and had interpreted the
+old man's look according to a knowledge all his own, came over to the
+bed, leaned down and whispered: "I will speak now."
+
+Then the eyes opened, and a smile faintly flickered at the mouth.
+
+"I will speak now," Soolsby said again into the old man's ear.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+THE VOICE THROUGH THE DOOR
+
+That night Soolsby tapped at the door of the lighted laboratory of the
+Cloistered House where Lord Eglington was at work; opened it, peered in,
+and stepped inside.
+
+With a glass retort in his hand Eglington faced him.  "What's this--what
+do you want?" he demanded.
+
+"I want to try an experiment," answered Soolsby grimly.
+
+"Ah, a scientific turn!" rejoined Eglington coolly--looking at him
+narrowly, however.  He was conscious of danger of some kind.
+
+Then for a minute neither spoke.  Now that Soolsby had come to the moment
+for which he had waited for so many ,years, the situation was not what he
+had so often prefigured.  The words he had chosen long ago were gone from
+his memory; in his ignorance of what had been a commonplace to Soolsby's
+dark reflection so long, the man he had meant to bring low stood up
+before him on his own ground, powerful and unabashed.
+
+Eglington wore a blue smock, and over his eyes was a green shade to
+protect them from the light, but they peered sharply out at the chair-
+maker, and were boldly alive to the unexpected.  He was no physical
+coward, and, in any case, what reason had he for physical fear in the
+presence of this man weakened by vice and age?  Yet ever since he was a
+boy there had existed between them an antagonism which had shown itself
+in many ways.  There had ever been something sinister in Soolsby's
+attitude to his father and himself.
+
+Eglington vaguely knew that now he was to face some trial of mind and
+nerve, but with great deliberation he continued dropping liquid from a
+bottle into the glass retort he carried, his eyes, however, watchful of
+his visitor, who involuntarily stared around the laboratory.
+
+It was fifteen years since Soolsby had been in this room; and then he had
+faced this man's father with a challenge on his tongue such as he meant
+to speak now.  The smell of the chemicals, the carboys filled with acids,
+the queer, tapering glasses with engraved measurements showing against
+the coloured liquids, the great blue bottles, the mortars and pestles,
+the microscopic instruments--all brought back the far-off, acrid scene
+between the late Earl and himself.  Nothing had changed, except that now
+there were wires which gave out hissing sparks, electrical instruments
+invented since the earlier day; except that this man, gently dropping
+acids into the round white bottle upon a crystal which gave off musty
+fumes, was bolder, stronger, had more at stake than the other.
+
+Slowly Eglington moved back to put the retort on a long table against the
+wall, and Soolsby stepped forward till he stood where the electric sparks
+were gently hissing about him.  Now Eglington leaned against the table,
+poured some alcohol on his fingers to cleanse the acid from them, and
+wiped them with a piece of linen, while he looked inquiringly at Soolsby.
+Still, Soolsby did not speak.  Eglington lit a cigarette, and took away
+the shade from his eyes.
+
+"Well, now, what is your experiment?" he asked, "and why bring it here?
+Didn't you know the way to the stables or the scullery?"
+
+"I knew my way better here," answered Soolsby, steadying himself.
+
+"Ah, you've been here often?" asked Eglington nonchalantly, yet feeling
+for the cause of this midnight visit.
+
+"It is fifteen years since I was here, my lord.  Then I came to see the
+Earl of Eglington."
+
+"And so history repeats itself every fifteen years!  You came to see the
+Earl of Eglington then; you come to see the Earl of Eglington again--
+after fifteen years!"
+
+"I come to speak with him that's called the Earl of Eglington."
+
+Eglington's eyes half closed, as though the light hurt them.  "That
+sounds communistic, or is it pure Quakerism?  I believe they used to call
+my father Friend Robert till he backslided.  But you are not a Quaker,
+Soolsby, so why be too familiar?  Or is it merely the way of the old
+family friend?"
+
+"I knew your father before you were born, my lord--he troosted me then."
+
+"So long?  And fifteen years ago--here?"  He felt a menace, vague and
+penetrating.  His eyes were hard and cruel.
+
+"It wasn't a question of troost then; 'twas one of right or wrong--naught
+else."
+
+"Ah--and who was right, and what was wrong?"  At that moment there came a
+tap at the door leading into the living part of the house, and the butler
+entered.  "The doctor--he has used up all his oxygen, my lord.  He begs
+to know if you can give him some for Mr. Claridge.  Mr. Claridge is bad
+to-night."
+
+A sinister smile passed over Eglington's face.  "Who brings the message,
+Garry?"
+
+"A servant--Miss Claridge's, my lord."
+
+An ironical look came into Eglington's eyes; then they softened a little.
+In a moment he placed a jar of oxygen in the butler's hands.
+
+"My compliments to Miss Claridge, and I am happy to find my laboratory of
+use at last to my neighbours," he said, and the door closed upon the man.
+
+Then he came back thoughtfully.  Soolsby had not moved.
+
+"Do you know what oxygen's for, Soolsby?" he asked quizzically.
+
+"No, my lord, I've never heerd tell of it."
+
+"Well, if you brought the top of Ben Lomond to the bottom of a coal-mine
+--breath to the breathless--that's it.
+
+"You've been doing that to Mr. Claridge, my lord?"
+
+"A little oxygen more or less makes all the difference to a man--it
+probably will to neighbour Claridge, Soolsby; and so I've done him a good
+turn."
+
+A grim look passed over Soolsby's face.  "It's the first, I'm thinking,
+my lord, and none too soon; and it'll be the last, I'm thinking, too.
+It's many a year since this house was neighbourly to that."
+
+Eglington's eyes almost closed, as he studied the other's face; then he
+said: "I asked you a little while ago who was right and what was wrong
+when you came to see my father here fifteen years ago.  Well?"
+
+Suddenly a thought flashed into his eyes, and it seemed to course through
+his veins like some anaesthetic, for he grew very still, and a minute
+passed before he added quietly: "Was it a thing between my father and
+Luke Claridge?  There was trouble--well, what was it?"  All at once he
+seemed to rise above the vague anxiety that possessed him, and he
+fingered inquiringly a long tapering glass of acids on the bench beside
+him.  "There's been so much mystery, and I suppose it was nothing, after
+all.  What was it all about?  Or do you know--eh?  Fifteen years ago you
+came to see my father, and now you have come to see me--all in the light
+o' the moon, as it were; like a villain in a play.  Ah, yes, you said it
+was to make an experiment--yet you didn't know what oxygen was!  It's
+foolish making experiments, unless you know what you are playing with,
+Soolsby.  See, here are two glasses."  He held them up.  "If I poured one
+into the other, we'd have an experiment--and you and I would be picked up
+in fragments and carried away in a basket.  And that wouldn't be a
+successful experiment, Soolsby."
+
+"I'm not so sure of that, my lord.  Some things would be put right then."
+
+"H'm, there would be a new Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, and--"
+
+"And Claridge Pasha would come back from Egypt, my lord," was the sharp
+interjection.  Suddenly Soolsby's anger flared up, his hands twitched.
+"You had your chance to be a friend to him, my lord.  You promised her
+yonder at the Red Mansion that you would help him--him that never wronged
+you, him you always wronged, and you haven't lifted hand to help him in
+his danger.  A moment since you asked me who was right and what was
+wrong.  You shall know.  If you had treated him right, I'd have held my
+peace, and kept my word to her that's gone these thirty-odd years.  I'll
+hold it no more, and so I told Luke Claridge.  I've been silent, but not
+for your father's sake or yours, for he was as cruel as you, with no
+heart, and a conscience like a pin's head, not big enough for use.  .  .
+Ay, you shall know.  You are no more the Earl of Eglington than me.
+
+"The Earl of Eglington is your elder brother, called David Claridge."
+
+As Soolsby's words poured forth passionately, weighty, Eglington listened
+like one in a dream.  Since this man entered the laboratory fifty reasons
+for his coming had flashed across his mind; he had prepared himself at
+many corners for defence, he had rallied every mental resource, he had
+imagined a dozen dangerous events which his father and Luke Claridge
+shared--with the balance against his father; but this thing was beyond
+all speculation.  Yet on the instant the words were said he had a
+conviction of their inevitable truth.  Even as they were uttered,
+kaleidoscopic memories rushed in, and David's face, figure, personal
+characteristics, flashed before him.  He saw, he felt, the likeness to
+his father and himself; a thousand things were explained that could only
+be explained by this fatal fact launched at him without warning.  It was
+as though, fully armed for his battle of life, he had suddenly been
+stripped of armour and every weapon, and left naked on the field.  But he
+had the mind of the gamester, and the true gamester's self-control.  He
+had taken chances so often that the tornado of ill-luck left him
+standing.
+
+"What proof have you?" he asked quietly.  Soolsby's explicit answer left
+no ground for doubt.  He had not asked the question with any idea of
+finding gaps in the evidence, but rather to find if there were a chance
+for resistance, of escape, anywhere.  The marriage certificate existed;
+identification of James Fetherdon with his father could be established by
+Soolsby and Luke Claridge.
+
+Soolsby and Luke Claridge!  Luke Claridge--he could not help but smile
+cynically, for he was composed and calculating now.  A few minutes ago
+he had sent a jar of oxygen to keep Luke Claridge alive!  But for it one
+enemy to his career, to his future, would be gone.  He did not shrink
+from the thought.  Born a gentleman, there were in him some degenerate
+characteristics which heart could not drown or temperament refine.
+Selfishness was inwoven with every fibre of his nature.
+
+Now, as he stood with eyes fixed on Soolsby, the world seemed to narrow
+down to this laboratory.  It was a vacuum where sensation was suspended,
+and the million facts of ordinary existence disappeared into inactivity.
+There was a fine sense of proportion in it all.  Only the bare essential
+things that concerned him remained: David Claridge was the Earl of
+Eglington, this man before him knew, Luke Claridge knew; and there was
+one thing yet to know!  When he spoke his voice showed no excitement--the
+tones were even, colourless.
+
+"Does he know?"  In these words he acknowledged that he believed the tale
+told him.
+
+Soolsby had expected a different attitude; he was not easier in mind
+because his story had not been challenged.  He blindly felt working in
+the man before him a powerful mind, more powerful because it faced the
+truth unflinchingly; but he knew that this did not mean calm acceptance
+of the consequences.  He, not Eglington, was dazed and embarrassed, was
+not equal to the situation.  He moved uneasily, changed his position.
+
+"Does he know?" Eglington questioned again quietly.  There was no need
+for Eglington to explain who he was.
+
+"Of course he does not know--I said so.  If he knew, do you think he'd be
+in Egypt and you here, my lord?"
+
+Eglington was very quiet.  His intellect more than his passions were now
+at work.
+
+"I am not sure.  You never can tell.  This might not mean much to him.
+He has got his work cut out; he wasn't brought up to this.  What he has
+done is in line with the life he has lived as a pious Quaker.  What good
+would it do to bring him back?  I have been brought up to it; I am used
+to it; I have worked things out 'according to the state of life to which
+I was called.'  Take what I've always had away from me, and I am
+crippled; give him what he never had, and it doesn't work into his
+scheme.  It would do him no good and me harm--Where's the use?  Besides,
+I am still my father's son.  Don't you see how unreasonable you are?
+Luke Claridge was right.  He knew that he and his belonged to a different
+sphere.  He didn't speak.  Why do you speak now after all these years
+when we are all set in our grooves?  It's silly to disturb us, Soolsby."
+
+The voice was low, persuasive, and searching; the mind was working as it
+had never worked before, to achieve an end by peaceful means, when war
+seemed against him.  And all the time he was fascinated by the fact that
+Soolsby's hand was within a few inches of a live electric wire, which, if
+he touched, would probably complete "the experiment" he had come to make;
+and what had been the silence of a generation would continue
+indefinitely.  It was as though Fate had deliberately tempted him and
+arranged the necessary conditions, for Soolsby's feet were in a little
+pool of liquid which had been spilled on the floor--the experiment was
+exact and real.
+
+For minutes he had watched Soolsby's hand near the wire-had watched as he
+talked, and his talk was his argument for non-interference against
+warning the man who had come to destroy him and his career.  Why had Fate
+placed that hand so near the wire there, and provided the other perfect
+conditions for tragedy?  Why should he intervene?  It would never have
+crossed his mind to do Soolsby harm, yet here, as the man's arm was
+stretched out to strike him, Fate offered an escape.  Luke Claridge was
+stricken with paralysis, no doubt would die; Soolsby alone stood in his
+way.
+
+"You see, Soolsby, it has gone on too long," he added, in a low,
+penetrating tone.  "It would be a crime to alter things now.  Give him
+the earldom and the estates, and his work in Egypt goes to pieces; he
+will be spoiled for all he wants to do.  I've got my faults, but, on the
+whole, I'm useful, and I play my part here, as I was born to it, as well
+as most.  Anyhow, it's no robbery for me to have what has been mine by
+every right except the accident of being born after him.  I think you'll
+see that you will do a good thing to let it all be.  Luke Claridge, if he
+was up and well, wouldn't thank you for it--have you got any right to
+give him trouble, too?  Besides, I've saved his life to-night, and. . . .
+and perhaps I might save yours, Soolsby, if it was in danger."
+
+Soolsby's hand had moved slightly.  It was only an inch from the wire.
+For an instant the room was terribly still.
+
+An instant, and it might be too late.  An instant, and Soolsby would be
+gone.  Eglington watched the hand which had been resting on the table
+turn slowly over to the wire.  Why should he intervene?  Was it his
+business?  This thing was not his doing.  Destiny had laid the train of
+circumstance and accident, and who was stronger than Destiny?  In spite
+of himself his eyes fixed themselves on Soolsby's hand.  It was but a
+hair's breadth from the wire.  The end would come now.  Suddenly a voice
+was heard outside the door.  "Eglington!" it called.
+
+Soolsby started, his hand drew spasmodically away from the wire, and he
+stepped back quickly.
+
+The door opened, and Hylda entered.
+
+"Mr. Claridge is dead, Eglington," she said.  Destiny had decided.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+"I OWE YOU NOTHING"
+
+Beside the grave under the willow-tree another grave had been made.  It
+was sprinkled with the fallen leaves of autumn.  In the Red Mansion
+Faith's delicate figure moved forlornly among relics of an austere,
+beloved figure vanished from the apricot-garden and the primitive
+simplicity of wealth combined with narrow thought.
+
+Since her father's death, the bereaved girl had been occupied by matters
+of law and business, by affairs of the estate; but the first pressure was
+over, long letters had been written to David which might never reach him;
+and now, when the strain was withdrawn, the gentle mind was lost in a
+grey mist of quiet suffering.  In Hamley there were but two in whom she
+had any real comfort and help--Lady Eglington and the old chair-maker.
+Of an afternoon or evening one or the other was to be seen in the long
+high-wainscoted room, where a great fire burned, or in the fruitless
+garden where the breeze stirred the bare branches.
+
+Almost as deep a quiet brooded in the Cloistered House as in the home
+where mourning enjoined movement in a minor key.  Hylda had not recovered
+wholly from the illness which had stricken her down on that day in London
+when she had sought news of David from Eglington, at such cost to her
+peace and health and happiness.  Then had come her slow convalescence in
+Hamley, and long days of loneliness, in which Eglington seemed to retreat
+farther and farther from her inner life.  Inquiries had poured in from
+friends in town, many had asked to come and see her; flowers came from
+one or two who loved her benignly, like Lord Windlehurst; and now and
+then she had some cheerful friend with her who cared for music or could
+sing; and then the old home rang; but she was mostly alone, and Eglington
+was kept in town by official business the greater part of each week.  She
+did not gain strength as quickly as she ought to have done, and this was
+what brought the Duchess of Snowdon down on a special mission one day of
+early November.
+
+Ever since the night she had announced Luke Claridge's death to
+Eglington, had discovered Soolsby with him, had seen the look in her
+husband's face and caught the tension of the moment on which she had
+broken, she had been haunted by a hovering sense of trouble.  What had
+Soolsby been doing in the laboratory at that time of night?  What was the
+cause of this secret meeting?  All Hamley knew--she had long known--how
+Luke Claridge had held the Cloistered House in abhorrence, and she knew
+also that Soolsby worshipped David and Faith, and, whatever the cause of
+the family antipathy, championed it.  She was conscious of a shadow
+somewhere, and behind it all was the name of David's father, James
+Fetherdon.  That last afternoon when she had talked with him, and he had
+told her of his life, she had recalled the name as one she had seen or
+heard, and it had floated into her mind at last that she had seen it
+among the papers and letters of the late Countess of Eglington.
+
+As the look in Eglington's face the night she came upon him and Soolsby
+in the laboratory haunted her, so the look in her own face had haunted
+Soolsby.  Her voice announcing Luke Claridge's death had suddenly opened
+up a new situation to him.  It stunned him; and afterwards, as he saw
+Hylda with Faith in the apricot-garden, or walking in the grounds of the
+Cloistered House hour after hour alone or with her maid, he became vexed
+by a problem greater than had yet perplexed him.  It was one thing to
+turn Eglington out of his lands and home and title; it was another thing
+to strike this beautiful being, whose smile had won him from the first,
+whose voice, had he but known, had saved his life.  Perhaps the truth in
+some dim way was conveyed to him, for he came to think of her a little as
+he thought of Faith.
+
+Since the moment when he had left the laboratory and made his way to the
+Red Mansion, he and Eglington had never met face to face; and he avoided
+a meeting.  He was not a blackmailer, he had no personal wrongs to
+avenge, he had not sprung the bolt of secrecy for evil ends; and when he
+saw the possible results of his disclosure, he was unnerved.  His mind
+had seen one thing only, the rights of "Our Man," the wrong that had been
+done him and his mother; but now he saw how the sword of justice, which
+he had kept by his hand these many years, would cut both ways.  His mind
+was troubled, too, that he had spoken while yet Luke Claridge lived, and
+so broken his word to Mercy Claridge.  If he had but waited till the old
+man died--but one brief half-hour--his pledge would have been kept.
+Nothing had worked out wholly as he expected.  The heavens had not
+fallen.  The "second-best lordship" still came and went, the wheels went
+round as usual.  There was no change; yet, as he sat in his hut and
+looked down into the grounds of the Cloistered House, he kept saying to
+himself.
+
+"It had to be told.  It's for my lord now.  He knows the truth.  I'll
+wait and see.  It's for him to do right by Our Man that's beyond and
+away."
+
+The logic and fairness of this position, reached after much thinking,
+comforted him.  He had done his duty so far.  If, in the end, the
+"second-best lordship" failed to do his part, hid the truth from the
+world, refused to do right by his half-brother, the true Earl, then would
+be time to act again.  Also he waited for word out of Egypt; and he had a
+superstitious belief that David would return, that any day might see him
+entering the door of the Red Mansion.
+
+Eglington himself was haunted by a spectre which touched his elbow by
+day, and said: "You are not the Earl of Eglington," and at night laid a
+clammy finger on his forehead, waking him, and whispering in his ear:
+"If Soolsby had touched the wire, all would now be well!"  And as deep as
+thought and feeling in him lay, he felt that Fate had tricked him--Fate
+and Hylda.  If Hylda had not come at that crucial instant, the
+chairmaker's but on the hill would be empty.  Why had not Soolsby told
+the world the truth since?  Was the man waiting to see what course he
+himself would take?  Had the old chair-maker perhaps written the truth
+to the Egyptian--to his brother David.
+
+His brother!  The thought irritated every nerve in him.  No note of
+kindness or kinship or blood stirred in him.  If, before, he had had
+innate antagonism and a dark, hovering jealousy, he had a black
+repugnance now--the antipathy of the lesser to the greater nature,
+of the man in the wrong to the man in the right.
+
+And behind it all was the belief that his wife had set David above him--
+by how much or in what fashion he did not stop to consider; but it made
+him desire that death and the desert would swallow up his father's son
+and leave no trace behind.
+
+Policy?  His work in the Foreign Office now had but one policy so far as
+Egypt was concerned.  The active sophistry in him made him advocate non-
+intervention in Egyptian affairs as diplomatic wisdom, though it was but
+personal purpose; and he almost convinced himself that he was acting from
+a national stand-point.  Kaid and Claridge Pasha pursued their course of
+civilisation in the Soudan, and who could tell what danger might not
+bring forth?  If only Soolsby held his peace yet a while!
+
+Did Faith know?  Luke Claridge was gone without speaking, but had Soolsby
+told Faith?  How closely had he watched the faces round him at Luke
+Claridge's funeral, to see if they betrayed any knowledge!
+
+Anxious days had followed that night in the laboratory.  His boundless
+egotism had widened the chasm between Hylda and himself, which had been
+made on the day when she fell ill in London, with Lacey's letter in her
+hand.  It had not grown less in the weeks that followed.  He nursed a
+grievance which had, so far as he knew, no foundation in fact; he was
+vaguely jealous of a man--his brother--thousands of miles away; he was
+not certain how far Hylda had pierced the disguise of sincerity which he
+himself had always worn, or how far she understood him.  He thought that
+she shrank from what she had seen of his real self, much or little, and
+he was conscious of so many gifts and abilities and attractive personal
+qualities that he felt a sense of injury.  Yet what would his position
+be without her?  Suppose David should return and take the estates and
+titles, and suppose that she should close her hand upon her fortune and
+leave him, where would he be?
+
+He thought of all this as he sat in his room at the Foreign Office and
+looked over St. James's Park, his day's work done.  He was suddenly
+seized by a new-born anxiety, for he had been so long used to the open
+purse and the unchecked stream of gold, had taken it so much as a matter
+of course, as not to realise the possibility of its being withdrawn.
+He was conscious of a kind of meanness and ugly sordidness in the
+suggestion; but the stake--his future, his career, his position in the
+world--was too high to allow him to be too chivalrous.  His sense of the
+real facts was perverted.  He said to himself that he must be practical.
+
+Moved by the new thought, he seized a time-table and looked up the
+trains.  He had been ten days in town, receiving every morning a little
+note from Hylda telling of what she had done each day; a calm, dutiful
+note, written without pretence, and out of a womanly affection with which
+she surrounded the man who, it seemed once--such a little while ago--must
+be all in all to her.  She had no element of pretence in her.  What she
+could give she gave freely, and it was just what it appeared to be.  He
+had taken it all as his due, with an underlying belief that, if he chose
+to make love to her again, he could blind her to all else in the world.
+Hurt vanity and egotism and jealousy had prevented him from luring her
+back to that fine atmosphere in which he had hypnotised her so few years
+ago.  But suddenly, as he watched the swans swimming in the pond below, a
+new sense of approaching loss, all that Hylda had meant in his march and
+progress, came upon him; and he hastened to return to Hamley.
+
+Getting out of the train at Heddington, he made up his mind to walk home
+by the road that David had taken on his return from Egypt, and he left
+word at the station that he would send for his luggage.
+
+His first objective was Soolsby's hut, and, long before he reached it,
+darkness had fallen.  From a light shining through the crack of the blind
+he knew that Soolsby was at home.  He opened the door and entered without
+knocking.  Soolsby was seated at a table, a map and a newspaper spread
+out before him.  Egypt and David, always David and Egypt!
+
+Soolsby got to his feet slowly, his eyes fixed inquiringly on his
+visitor.
+
+"I didn't knock," said Eglington, taking off his greatcoat and reaching
+for a chair; then added, as he seated himself: "Better sit down,
+Soolsby."
+
+After a moment he continued: "Do you mind my smoking?"
+
+Soolsby did not reply, but sat down again.  He watched Eglington light a
+cigar and stretch out his hands to the wood fire with an air of comfort.
+
+A silence followed.  Eglington appeared to forget the other's presence,
+and to occupy himself with thoughts that glimmered in the fire.
+
+At last Soolsby said moodily: "What have you come for, my lord?"
+
+"Oh, I am my lord still, am I?" Eglington returned lazily.  "Is it a
+genealogical tree you are studying there?"  He pointed to the map.
+
+"I've studied your family tree with care, as you should know, my lord;
+and a map of Egypt"--he tapped the parchment before him--"goes well with
+it.  And see, my lord, Egypt concerns you too.  Lord Eglington is there,
+and 'tis time he was returning-ay, 'tis time."
+
+There was a baleful look in Soolsby's eyes.  Whatever he might think,
+whatever considerations might arise at other times, a sinister feeling
+came upon him when Eglington was with him.
+
+"And, my lord," he went on, "I'd be glad to know that you've sent for
+him, and told him the truth."
+
+"Have you?"  Eglington flicked the ash from his cigar, speaking coolly.
+
+Soolsby looked at him with his honest blue eyes aflame, and answered
+deliberately: "I was not for taking your place, my lord.  'Twas my duty
+to tell you, but the rest was between you and the Earl of Eglington."
+
+"That was thoughtful of you, Soolsby.  And Miss Claridge?"
+
+"I told you that night, my lord, that only her father and myself knew;
+and what was then is now."
+
+A look of relief stole across Eglington's face.  "Of course--of course.
+These things need a lot of thought, Soolsby.  One must act with care--
+no haste, no flurry, no mistakes."
+
+"I would not wait too long, my lord, or be too careful."  There was
+menace in the tone.
+
+"But if you go at things blind, you're likely to hurt where you don't
+mean to hurt.  When you're mowing in a field by a school-house, you must
+look out for the children asleep in the grass.  Sometimes the longest way
+round is the shortest way home."
+
+"Do you mean to do it or not, my lord?  I've left it to you as a
+gentleman."
+
+"It's going to upset more than you think, Soolsby.  Suppose he, out there
+in Egypt"--he pointed again to the map--"doesn't thank me for the
+information.  Suppose he says no, and--"
+
+"Right's right.  Give him the chance, my lord.  How can you know, unless
+you tell him the truth?"
+
+"Do you like living, Soolsby?"
+
+"Do you want to kill me, my lord?"
+
+There was a dark look in Eglington's face.  "But answer me, do you want
+to live?"
+
+"I want to live long enough to see the Earl of Eglington in his own
+house."
+
+"Well, I've made that possible.  The other night when you were telling me
+your little story, you were near sending yourself into eternity--as near
+as I am knocking this ash off my cigar."  His little finger almost
+touched the ash.  "Your hand was as near touching a wire charged with
+death.  I saw it.  It would have been better for me if you had gone; but
+I shut off the electricity.  Suppose I hadn't, could I have been blamed?
+It would have been an accident.  Providence did not intervene; I did.
+You owe me something, Soolsby."
+
+Soolsby stared at him almost blindly for a moment.  A mist was before his
+eyes; but through the mist, though he saw nothing of this scene in which
+he now was, he saw the laboratory, and himself and Eglington, and
+Eglington's face as it peered at him, and, just before the voice called
+outside, Eglington's eyes fastened on his hand.  It all flashed upon him
+now, and he saw himself starting back at the sound of the voice.
+
+Slowly he got up now, went to the door, and opened it.  "My lord, it is
+not true," he said.  "You have not spoken like a gentleman.  It was my
+lady's voice that saved me.  This is my castle, my lord--you lodge
+yonder."  He pointed down into the darkness where the lights of the
+village shone.  "I owe you nothing.  I pay my debts.  Pay yours, my lord,
+to him that's beyond and away."
+
+Eglington kept his countenance as he drew on his great-coat and slowly
+passed from the house.
+
+"I ought to have let you die, Soolsby.  Y'ou'll think better of this
+soon.  But it's quite right to leave the matter to me.  It may take a
+little time, but everything will come right.  Justice shall be done.
+Well, good night, Soolsby.  You live too much alone, and imagination
+is a bad thing for the lonely.  Good night-good night."
+
+Going down the hill quickly, he said to himself: "A sort of second sight
+he had about that wire.  But time is on my side, time and the Soudan--
+and 'The heathen in his blindness.  .  .  .' I will keep what is mine.
+I will keep it!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+THE AWAKENING
+
+In her heart of hearts Hylda had not greatly welcomed the Duchess of
+Snowdon to Hamley.  There was no one whose friendship she prized more;
+but she was passing through a phase of her life when she felt that she
+was better apart, finding her own path by those intuitions and
+perceptions which belonged to her own personal experience.  She vaguely
+felt, what all realise sooner or later, that we must live our dark hours
+alone.
+
+Yet the frank downright nature of the once beautiful, now faded, Duchess,
+the humorous glimmer in the pale-blue eyes, the droll irony and dry truth
+of her speech, appealed to Hylda, made her smile a warm greeting when she
+would rather have been alone.  For, a few days before, she had begun a
+quest which had absorbed her, fascinated her.  The miner, finding his way
+across the gap of a reef to pick up the vein of quartz at some distant
+and uncertain point, could not have been more lost to the world than was
+the young wife searching for a family skeleton, indefinitely embodied in
+her imagination by the name, James Fetherdon.
+
+Pile after pile of papers and letters of the late Earl and his Countess
+had passed through her hands from chaos to order.  As she had read, hour
+after hour, the diaries of the cold, blue-eyed woman, Sybil Eglington,
+who had lived without love of either husband or son, as they, in turn,
+lived without love of each other, she had been overwhelmed by the
+revelation of a human heart, whose powers of expression were smothered by
+a shy and awkward temperament.  The late Countess's letters were the
+unclothing of a heart which had never expanded to the eyes of those whose
+love would have broken up a natural reserve, which became at last a proud
+coldness, and gave her a reputation for lack of feeling that she carried
+to her grave.
+
+In the diaries which Hylda unearthed--the Countess had died suddenly--
+was the muffled cry of a soul tortured through different degrees of
+misunderstanding; from the vague pain of suffered indifference, of being
+left out of her husband's calculations, to the blank neglect narrowing
+her life down to a tiny stream of duty, which was finally lost in the
+sands.  She had died abroad, and alone, save for her faithful maid, who,
+knowing the chasm that lay between her mistress and her lord, had brought
+her letters and papers back to the Cloistered House, and locked them away
+with all the other papers and correspondence which the Countess had
+accumulated.
+
+Among these papers was a letter to the late Lord Eglington written the
+day before she died.  In the haste and confusion ensuing on her death,
+the maid had not seen it.  It had never reached his hands, but lay in a
+pocket of the dead woman's writing-portfolio, which Hylda had explored
+without discovering.  Only a few hours, however, before the Duchess of
+Snowdon came, Hylda had found again an empty envelope on which was
+written the name, James Fetherdon.  The writing on the envelope was that
+of Sybil Lady Eglington.
+
+When she discovered the envelope, a sense of mystery and premonition
+possessed her.  What was the association between the Countess of
+Eglington and James Fetherdon, the father of David Claridge?  In vain she
+searched among the voluminous letters and papers, for it would seem that
+the dead woman had saved every letter she received, and kept copies of
+numberless letters she had written.  But she had searched without avail.
+Even the diaries, curiously frank and without reserve, never mentioned
+the name, so far as she could find, though here and there were strange
+allusive references, hints of a trouble that weighed her down, phrases of
+exasperation and defiance.  One phrase, or the idea in it, was, however,
+much repeated in the diaries during the course of years, and towards the
+last almost feverishly emphasised--"Why should I bear it for one who
+would bear nothing for me, for his sake, who would do nothing for my
+sake?  Is it only the mother in me, not the love in me?"
+
+These words were haunting Hylda's brain when the telegram from the
+Duchess of Snowdon came.  They followed her to Heddington, whither she
+went in the carriage to bring her visitor to Hamley, and kept repeating
+themselves at the back of her mind through the cheerful rallying of the
+Duchess, who spread out the wings of good-humour and motherly freedom
+over her.
+
+After all, it was an agreeable thing to be taken possession of, and "put
+in her proper place," as the Duchess said; made to understand that her
+own affairs were not so important, after all; and that it was far more
+essential to hear the charming gossip about the new and most popular
+Princess of Wales, or the quarrel between Dickens and Thackeray.  Yet,
+after dinner, in the little sitting-room, where the Duchess, in a white
+gown with great pink bows, fitter for a girl fresh from Confirmation, and
+her cheeks with their fixed colour, which changed only at the discretion
+of her maid, babbled of nothing that mattered, Hylda's mind kept turning
+to the book of life an unhappy woman had left behind her.  The sitting-
+room had been that of the late Countess also, and on the wall was an oil-
+painting of her, stately and distant and not very alluring, though the
+mouth had a sweetness which seemed unable to break into a smile.
+
+"What was she really like--that wasn't her quite, was it?" asked Hylda,
+at last, leaning her chin on the hand which held the 'cello she had been
+playing.
+
+"Oh, yes, it's Sybil Eglington, my dear, but done in wood; and she wasn't
+the graven image that makes her out to be.  That's as most people saw
+her; as the fellow that painted her saw her; but she had another side to
+her.  She disapproved of me rather, because I was squeezing the orange
+dry, and trying to find yesterday's roses in to-morrow's garden.  But she
+didn't shut her door in my face--it's hard to do that to a Duchess; which
+is one of the few advantages of living naked in the street, as it were,
+with only the strawberry leaves to clothe you.  No, Sybil Eglington was a
+woman who never had her chance.  Your husband's forbears were difficult,
+my dear.  They didn't exactly draw you out.  She needed drawing out; and
+her husband drove her back into her corner, where she sulked rather till
+she died--died alone at Wiesbaden, with a German doctor, a stray curate,
+and a stuttering maid to wish her bon voyage.  Yet I fancy she went glad
+enough, for she had no memories, not even an affaire to repent of, and to
+cherish.  La, la!  she wasn't so stupid, Sybil there, and she was an
+ornament to her own sex and the despair of the other.  His Serene
+Highness Heinrich of Saxe-Gunden fancied the task of breaking that ice,
+and he was an adept and an Apollo, but it broke his reputation instead.
+
+"No doubt she is happy now.  I shall probably never see!"
+
+In spite of the poignant nature of the talk, Hylda could not but smile at
+the last words.
+
+"Don't despair," she rejoined; "one star differeth from another star in
+glory, but that is no reason why they should not be on visiting terms."
+
+"My dear, you may laugh--you may laugh, but I am sixty-five, and I am not
+laughing at the idea of what company I may be obliged to keep presently.
+In any case I'm sure I shall not be comfortable.  If I'm where she is, I
+shall be dull; if I'm where her husband is, I'll have no reputation; and
+if there is one thing I want, it is a spotless reputation--sometime."
+
+Hylda laughed--the manner and the voice were so droll--but her face
+saddened too, and her big eyes with the drooping lashes looked up
+pensively at the portrait of her husband's mother.
+
+"Was it ever a happy family, or a lucky family?" she asked.
+
+"It's lucky now, and it ought to be happy now," was the meaning reply.
+
+Hylda made no answer, but caught the strings of the 'cello lightly, and
+shook her head reprovingly, with a smile meant to be playful.  For a
+moment she played, humming to herself, and then the Duchess touched the
+hand that was drawing the bow softly across the strings.  She had behind
+her garishness a gift for sympathy and a keen intuition, delicacy, and
+allusiveness.  She knew what to say and what to leave unsaid, when her
+heart was moved.
+
+"My darling," she said now, "you are not quite happy; but that is because
+you don't allow yourself to get well.  You've never recovered from your
+attack last summer; and you won't, until you come out into the world
+again and see people.  This autumn you ought to have been at Homburg or
+at Aix, where you'd take a little cure of waters and a great deal of cure
+of people.  You were born to bask in friendship and the sun, and to draw
+from the world as much as you deserve, a little from many, for all you
+give in return.  Because, dearest, you are a very agreeable person, with
+enough wit and humanity to make it worth the world's while to conspire to
+make you do what will give it most pleasure, and let yourself get most--
+and that's why I've come."
+
+"What a person of importance I am!" answered Hylda, with a laugh that
+was far from mirthful, though she caught the plump, wrinkled little hand
+of the Duchess and pressed it.  "But really I'm getting well here fast.
+I'm very strong again.  It is so restful, and one's days go by so
+quietly."
+
+"Yet, I'm not sure that it's rest you want.  I don't think it is.  You
+want tonics--men and women and things.  Monte Carlo would do you a world
+of good--I'd go with you.  Eglington gambles here"--she watched Hylda
+closely--"why shouldn't you gamble there?"
+
+"Eglington gambles?"  Hylda's face took on a frightened look, then it
+cleared again, and she smiled.  "Oh, of course, with international
+affairs, you mean.  Well, I must stay here and be the croupier."
+
+"Nonsense!  Eglington is his own croupier.  Besides, he is so much in
+London, and you so much here.  You sit with the distaff; he throws the
+dice."
+
+Hylda's lips tightened a little.  Her own inner life, what Eglington was
+to her or she to Eglington, was for the ears of no human being, however
+friendly.  She had seen little of him of late, but in one sense that had
+been a relief, though she would have done anything to make that feeling
+impossible.  His rather precise courtesy and consideration, when he was
+with her, emphasised the distance between "the first fine careless
+rapture" and this grey quiet.  And, strange to say, though in the first
+five years after the Cairo days and deeds, Egypt seemed an infinite space
+away, and David a distant, almost legendary figure, now Egypt seemed but
+beyond the door--as though, opening it, she would stand near him who
+represented the best of all that she might be capable of thinking.  Yet
+all the time she longed for Eglington to come and say one word, which
+would be like touching the lever of the sluice-gates of her heart, to let
+loose the flood.  As the space grew between her and Eglington, her spirit
+trembled, she shrank back, because she saw that sea towards which she was
+drifting.
+
+As she did not answer the last words of the Duchess, the latter said
+presently: "When do you expect Eglington?"
+
+"Not till the week-end; it is a busy week with him," Hylda answered; then
+added hastily, though she had not thought of it till this moment: "I
+shall probably go up to town with you to-morrow."
+
+She did not know that Eglington was already in the house, and had given
+orders to the butler that she was not to be informed of his arrival for
+the present.
+
+"Well, if you get that far, will you come with me to the Riviera, or to
+Florence, or Sicily--or Cairo?" the other asked, adjusting her gold-
+brown wig with her babyish hands.
+
+Cairo!  Cairo!  A light shot up into Hylda's eyes.  The Duchess had
+spoken without thought, but, as she spoke, she watched the sudden change
+in Hylda.  What did it mean?  Cairo--why should Cairo have waked her so?
+Suddenly she recalled certain vague references of Lord Windlehurst, and,
+for the first time, she associated Hylda with Claridge Pasha in a way
+which might mean much, account for much, in this life she was leading.
+
+"Perhaps!  Perhaps!" answered Hylda abstractedly, after a moment.
+
+The Duchess got to her feet.  She had made progress.  She would let her
+medicine work.
+
+"I'm going to bed, my dear.  I'm sixty-five, and I take my sleep when I
+can get it.  Think it over, Sicily--Cairo!"
+
+She left the room, saying to herself that Eglington was a fool, and that
+danger was ahead.  "But I hold a red light--poor darling!" she said
+aloud, as she went up the staircase.  She did not know that Eglington,
+standing in a deep doorway, heard her, and seized upon the words eagerly
+and suspiciously, and turned them over in his mind.
+
+Below, at the desk where Eglington's mother used to write, Hylda sat with
+a bundle of letters before her.  For some moments she opened, glanced
+through them, and put them aside.  Presently she sat back in her chair,
+thinking--her mind was invaded by the last words of the Duchess; and
+somehow they kept repeating themselves with the words in the late
+Countess's diary: "Is it only the mother in me, not the love in me?"
+Mechanically her hand moved over the portfolio of the late Countess, and
+it involuntarily felt in one of its many pockets.  Her hand came upon a
+letter.  This had remained when the others had been taken out.  It was
+addressed to the late Earl, and was open.  She hesitated a moment, then,
+with a strange premonition and a tightening of her heart-strings, she
+spread it out and read it.
+
+At first she could scarcely see because of the mist in her eyes; but
+presently her sight cleared, and she read quickly, her cheeks burning
+with excitement, her heart throbbing violently.  The letter was the last
+expression of a disappointed and barren life.  The slow, stammering
+tongue of an almost silent existence had found the fulness of speech.
+The fountains of the deep had been broken up, and Sybil Eglington's
+repressed emotions, undeveloped passions, tortured by mortal sufferings,
+and refined and vitalised by the atmosphere blown in upon her last hours
+from the Hereafter, were set free, given voice and power at last.
+
+The letter reviewed the life she had lived with her husband during
+twenty-odd years, reproved herself for not speaking out and telling him
+his faults at the beginning, and for drawing in upon herself, when she
+might have compelled him to a truer understanding; and, when all that was
+said, called him to such an account as only the dying might make--the
+irrevocable, disillusionising truth which may not be altered, the
+poignant record of failure and its causes.
+
+     ".  .  .  I could not talk well, I never could, as a girl," the
+     letter ran; "and you could talk like one inspired, and so
+     speciously, so overwhelmingly, that I felt I could say nothing in
+     disagreement, not anything but assent; while all the time I felt how
+     hollow was so much you said--a cloak of words to cover up the real
+     thought behind.  Before I knew the truth, I felt the shadow of
+     secrecy in your life.  When you talked most, I felt you most
+     secretive, and the feeling slowly closed the door upon all frankness
+     and sympathy and open speech between us.  I was always shy and self-
+     conscious and self-centred, and thought little of myself; and I
+     needed deep love and confidence and encouragement to give out what
+     was in me.  I gave nothing out, nothing to you that you wanted, or
+     sought for, or needed.  You were complete, self-contained.  Harry,
+     my beloved babe Harry, helped at first; but, as the years went on,
+     he too began to despise me for my little intellect and slow
+     intelligence, and he grew to be like you in all things--and
+     secretive also, though I tried so hard to be to him what a mother
+     should be.  Oh, Bobby, Bobby--I used to call you that in the days
+     before we were married, and I will call you that now when all is
+     over and done--why did you not tell me all?  Why did you not tell me
+     that my boy, my baby Harry, was not your only child, that there had
+     been another wife, and that your eldest son was alive?
+
+     "I know all.  I have known all for years.  The clergyman who married
+     you to Mercy Claridge was a distant relative of my mother's, and
+     before he died he told me.  When you married her, he knew you only
+     as James Fetherdon, but, years afterwards, he saw and recognised
+     you.  He held his peace then, but at last he came to me.  And I did
+     not speak.  I was not strong enough, nor good enough, to face the
+     trouble of it all.  I could not endure the scandal, to see my own
+     son take the second place--he is so brilliant and able and
+     unscrupulous, like yourself; but, oh, so sure of winning a great
+     place in the world, surer than yourself ever was, he is so
+     calculating and determined and ambitious!  And though he loves me
+     little, as he loves you little, too, yet he is my son, and for what
+     he is we are both responsible, one way or another; and I had not the
+     courage to give him the second place, and the Quaker, David
+     Claridge, the first place.  Why Luke Claridge, his grandfather,
+     chose the course he did, does not concern me, no more than why you
+     chose secrecy, and kept your own firstborn legitimate son, of whom
+     you might well be proud, a stranger to you and his rights all these
+     years.  Ah, Eglington, you never knew what love was, you never had
+     a heart--experiment, subterfuge, secrecy, 'reaping where you had
+     not sowed, and gathering where you had not strawed.'  Always,
+     experiment, experiment, experiment!
+
+     "I shall be gone in a few hours--I feel it, but before I go I must
+     try to do right, and to warn you.  I have had such bad dreams about
+     you and Harry--they haunt me--that I am sure you will suffer
+     terribly, will have some awful tragedy, unless you undo what was
+     done long ago, and tell the truth to the world, and give your titles
+     and estates where they truly belong.  Near to death, seeing how
+     little life is, and how much right is in the end, I am sure that I
+     was wrong in holding my peace; for Harry cannot prosper with this
+     black thing behind him, and you cannot die happy if you smother up
+     the truth.  Night after night I have dreamed of you in your
+     laboratory, a vague, dark, terrifying dream of you in that
+     laboratory which I have hated so.  It has always seemed to me the
+     place where some native evil and cruelty in your blood worked out
+     its will.  I know I am an ignorant woman, with no brain, but God has
+     given me clear sight at the last, and the things I see are true
+     things, and I must warn you.  Remember that.  .  .  ."
+
+The letter ended there.  She had been interrupted or seized with illness,
+and had never finished it, and had died a few hours afterwards; and the
+letter was now, for the first time, read by her whom it most concerned,
+into whose heart and soul the words sank with an immitigable pain and
+agonised amazement.  A few moments with this death-document had
+transformed Hylda's life.
+
+Her husband and--and David, were sons of the same father; and the name
+she bore, the home in which she was living, the estates the title
+carried, were not her husband's, but another's--David's.  She fell back
+in her chair, white and faint, but, with a great effort, she conquered
+the swimming weakness which blinded her.  Sons of the same father!  The
+past flashed before her, the strange likeness she had observed, the trick
+of the head, the laugh, the swift gesture, the something in the voice.
+She shuddered as she had done in reading the letter.  But they were
+related only in name, in some distant, irreconcilable way--in a way
+which did not warrant the sudden scarlet flush that flooded her face.
+Presently she recovered herself.  She--what did she suffer, compared
+with her who wrote this revelation of a lifetime of pain, of bitter and
+torturing knowledge!  She looked up at the picture on the wall, at the
+still, proud, emotionless face, the conventional, uninspired personality,
+behind which no one had seen, which had agonised alone till the last.
+With what tender yet pitiless hand had she laid bare the lives of her
+husband and her son!  How had the neglected mother told the bitter truth
+of him to whom she had given birth!  "So brilliant and able, and
+unscrupulous, like yourself; but, oh, sure of winning a great place in
+the world .  .  .  so calculating and determined and ambitious.  .  .  .
+That laboratory which I have hated so.  It has always seemed to me the
+place where some native evil and cruelty in your blood worked out its
+will.  .  .  ."
+
+With a deep-drawn sigh Hylda said to herself: "If I were dying to-morrow,
+would I say that?  She loved them so--at first must have loved them so;
+and yet this at the last!  And I--oh, no, no, no!"  She looked at a
+portrait of Eglington on the table near, touched it caressingly, and
+added, with a sob in her voice: "Oh, Harry, no, it is not true!  It is
+not native evil and cruelty in your blood.  It has all been a mistake.
+You will do right.  We will do right, Harry.  You will suffer, it will
+hurt, the lesson will be hard--to give up what has meant so much to you;
+but we will work it out together, you and I, my very dear.  Oh, say that
+we shall, that....  " She suddenly grew silent.  A tremor ran through
+her, she became conscious of his presence near her, and turned, as though
+he were behind her.  There was nothing.  Yet she felt him near, and,
+as she did so, the soul-deep feeling with which she had spoken to the
+portrait fled.  Why was it that, so often, when absent from him, her
+imagination helped her to make excuses for him, inspired her to press the
+real truth out of sight, and to make believe that he was worthy of a love
+which, but through some inner fault of her own, might be his altogether,
+and all the love of which he was capable might be hers?
+
+She felt him near her, and the feelings possessing her a moment before
+slowly chilled and sank away.  Instinctively her eyes glanced towards the
+door.  She saw the handle turn, and she slipped the letter inside the
+portfolio again.
+
+The door opened briskly now, and Eglington entered with what his enemies
+in the newspaper press had called his "professional smile"--a criticism
+which had angered his wife, chiefly because it was so near the truth.  He
+smiled.  Smiling was part of his equipment, and was for any one at any
+time that suited him.
+
+Her eyes met his, and he noted in her something that he had never seen
+before.  Something had happened.  The Duchess of Snowdon was in the
+house; had it anything to do with her?  Had she made trouble?  There was
+trouble enough without her.  He came forward, took Hylda's hand and
+kissed it, then kissed her on the cheek.  As he did so, she laid a hand
+on his arm with a sudden impulse, and pressed it.  Though his presence
+had chilled the high emotions of a few moments before, yet she had to
+break to him a truth which would hurt him, dismay him, rob his life of so
+much that helped it; and a sudden protective, maternal sense was roused
+in her, reached out to shelter him as he faced his loss and the call of
+duty.
+
+"You have just come?" she said, in a voice that, to herself, seemed far
+away.
+
+"I have been here some hours," he answered.  Secrecy again--always the
+thing that had chilled the dead woman, and laid a cold hand upon herself
+--"I felt the shadow of secrecy in your life.  When you talked most I
+felt you most secretive, and the feeling slowly closed the door upon all
+frankness and sympathy and open speech between us."
+
+"Why did you not see me--dine with me?" she asked.  "What can the
+servants think?"  Even in such a crisis the little things had place--
+habit struck its note in the presence of her tragedy.
+
+"You had the Duchess of Snowdon, and we are not precisely congenial;
+besides, I had much to do in the laboratory.  I'm working for that new
+explosive of which I told you.  There's fame and fortune in it, and I'm
+on the way.  I feel it coming"--his eyes sparkled a little.  "I made it
+right with the servants; so don't be apprehensive."
+
+"I have not seen you for nearly a week.  It doesn't seem--friendly."
+
+"Politics and science are stern masters," he answered gaily.
+
+"They leave little time for your mistress," she rejoined meaningly.
+
+"Who is my mistress?"
+
+"Well, I am not greatly your wife," she replied.  "I have the dregs of
+your life.  I help you--I am allowed to help you--so little, to share so
+little in the things that matter to you."
+
+"Now, that's imagination and misunderstanding," he rejoined.  "It has
+helped immensely your being such a figure in society, and entertaining
+so much, and being so popular, at any rate until very lately."
+
+"I do not misunderstand," she answered gravely.  "I do not share your
+real life.  I do not help you where your brain works, in the plans and
+purposes and hopes that lie behind all that you do--oh, yes, I know your
+ambitions and what positions you are aiming for; but there is something
+more than that.  There is the object of it all, the pulse of it, the
+machinery down, down deep in your being that drives it all.  Oh, I am not
+a child!  I have some intellect, and I want--I want that we should work
+it out together."
+
+In spite of all that had come and gone, in spite of the dead mother's
+words and all her own convictions, seeing trouble coming upon him, she
+wanted to make one last effort for what might save their lives--her life-
+-from shipwreck in the end.  If she failed now, she foresaw a bitter,
+cynical figure working out his life with a narrowing soul, a hard spirit
+unrelieved by the softening influence of a great love--even yet the woman
+in her had a far-off hope that, where the law had made them one by book
+and scrip, the love which should consecrate such a union, lift it above
+an almost offensive relation, might be theirs.  She did not know how much
+of her heart, of her being, was wandering over the distant sands of
+Egypt, looking for its oasis.  Eglington had never needed or wanted more
+than she had given him--her fortune, her person, her charm, her ability
+to play an express and definite part in his career.  It was this material
+use to which she was so largely assigned, almost involuntarily but none
+the less truly, that had destroyed all of the finer, dearer, more
+delicate intimacy invading his mind sometimes, more or less vaguely,
+where Faith was concerned.  So extreme was his egotism that it had never
+occurred to him, as it had done to the Duchess of Snowdon and Lord
+Windlehurst, that he might lose Hylda herself as well as her fortune;
+that the day might come when her high spirit could bear it no longer.  As
+the Duchess of Snowdon had said: "It would all depend upon the other man,
+whoever he might be."
+
+So he answered her with superficial cheerfulness now; he had not the
+depth of soul to see that they were at a crisis, and that she could bear
+no longer the old method of treating her as though she were a child, to
+be humoured or to be dominated.
+
+"Well, you see all there is," he answered; "you are so imaginative,
+crying for some moon there never was in any sky."
+
+In part he had spoken the truth.  He had no high objects or ends or
+purposes.  He wanted only success somehow or another, and there was no
+nobility of mind or aspiration behind it.  In her heart of hearts she
+knew it; but it was the last cry of her soul to him, seeking, though in
+vain, for what she had never had, could never have.
+
+"What have you been doing?" he added, looking at the desk where she had
+sat, glancing round the room.  "Has the Duchess left any rags on the
+multitude of her acquaintances?  I wonder that you can make yourself
+contented here with nothing to do.  You don't look much stronger.  I'm
+sure you ought to have a change.  My mother was never well here; though,
+for the matter of that, she was never very well anywhere.  I suppose it's
+the laboratory that attracts me here, as it did my father, playing with
+the ancient forces of the world in these Arcadian surroundings--Arcady
+without beauty or Arcadians."  He glanced up at his mother's picture.
+"No, she never liked it--a very silent woman, secretive almost."
+
+Suddenly her eyes flared up.  Anger possessed her.  She choked it down.
+Secretive--the poor bruised soul who had gone to her grave with a broken
+heart!
+
+"She secretive?  No, Eglington," she rejoined gravely, "she was
+congealed.  She lived in too cold an air.  She was not secretive, but yet
+she kept a secret--another's."
+
+Again Eglington had the feeling which possessed him when he entered the
+room.  She had changed.  There was something in her tone, a meaning, he
+had never heard before.  He was startled.  He recalled the words of the
+Duchess as she went up the staircase.
+
+What was it all about?
+
+"Whose secrets did she keep?" he asked, calmly enough.
+
+"Your father's, yours, mine," she replied, in a whisper almost.
+
+"Secret?  What secret?  Good Lord, such mystery!"  He laughed
+mirthlessly.
+
+She came close to him.  "I am sorry--sorry, Harry," she said with
+difficulty.  "It will hurt you, shock you so.  It will be a blow to you,
+but you must bear it."
+
+She tried to speak further, but her heart was beating so violently that
+she could not.  She turned quickly to the portfolio on the desk, drew
+forth the fatal letter, and, turning to the page which contained the
+truth concerning David, handed it to him.  "It is there," she said.
+
+He had great self-control.  Before looking at the page to which she had
+directed his attention, he turned the letter over slowly, fingering the
+pages one by one.  "My mother to my father," he remarked.
+
+Instinctively he knew what it contained.  "You have been reading my
+mother's correspondence," he added in cold reproof.
+
+"Do you forget that you asked me to arrange her papers?" she retorted,
+stung by his suggestion.
+
+"Your imagination is vivid," he exclaimed.  Then he bethought himself
+that, after all, he might sorely need all she could give, if things went
+against him, and that she was the last person he could afford to
+alienate; "but I do remember that I asked you that," he added--"no doubt
+foolishly."
+
+"Read what is there," she broke in, "and you will see that it was not
+foolish, that it was meant to be."  He felt a cold dead hand reaching out
+from the past to strike him; but he nerved himself, and his eyes searched
+the paper with assumed coolness-even with her he must still be acting.
+The first words he saw were: "Why did you not tell me that my boy, my
+baby Harry, was not your only child, and that your eldest son was alive?"
+
+So that was it, after all.  Even his mother knew.  Master of his nerves
+as he was, it blinded him for a moment.  Presently he read on--the whole
+page--and lingered upon the words, that he might have time to think what
+he must say to Hylda.  Nothing of the tragedy of his mother touched him,
+though he was faintly conscious of a revelation of a woman he had never
+known, whose hungering caresses had made him, as a child, rather peevish,
+when a fit of affection was not on him.  Suddenly, as he read the lines
+touching himself, "Brilliant and able and unscrupulous....  and though he
+loves me little, as he loves you little too," his eye lighted up with
+anger, his face became pale--yet he had borne the same truths from Faith
+without resentment, in the wood by the mill that other year.  For a
+moment he stood infuriated, then, going to the fireplace, he dropped the
+letter on the coals, as Hylda, in horror, started forward to arrest his
+hand.
+
+"Oh, Eglington--but no--no!  It is not honourable.  It is proof of all!"
+
+He turned upon her slowly, his face rigid, a strange, cold light in his
+eyes.  "If there is no more proof than that, you need not vex your mind,"
+he said, commanding his voice to evenness.
+
+A bitter anger was on him.  His mother had read him through and through--
+he had not deceived her even; and she had given evidence against him to
+Hylda, who, he had ever thought, believed in him completely.  Now there
+was added to the miserable tale, that first marriage, and the rights
+of David--David, the man who, he was convinced, had captured her
+imagination.  Hurt vanity played a disproportionate part in this crisis.
+
+The effect on him had been different from what Hylda had anticipated.
+She had pictured him stricken and dumfounded by the blow.  It had never
+occurred to her, it did not now, that he had known the truth; for,
+of course, to know the truth was to speak, to restore to David his own,
+to step down into the second and unconsidered place.  After all, to her
+mind, there was no disgrace.  The late Earl had married secretly, but he
+had been duly married, and he did not marry again until Mercy Claridge
+was dead.  The only wrong was to David, whose grandfather had been even
+more to blame than his own father.  She had looked to help Eglington in
+this moment, and now there seemed nothing for her to do.  He was superior
+to the situation, though it was apparent in his pale face and rigid
+manner that he had been struck hard.
+
+She came near to him, but there was no encouragement to her to play that
+part which is a woman's deepest right and joy and pain in one--to comfort
+her man in trouble, sorrow, or evil.  Always, always, he stood alone,
+whatever the moment might be, leaving her nothing to do--" playing his
+own game with his own weapons," as he had once put it.  Yet there was
+strength in it too, and this came to her mind now, as though in excuse
+for whatever else there was in the situation which, against her will,
+repelled her.
+
+"I am so sorry for you," she said at last.
+
+"What do you mean?" he asked.
+
+"To lose all that has been yours so long."
+
+This was their great moment.  The response to this must be the touchstone
+of their lives.  A--half dozen words might alter all the future, might be
+the watch word to the end of all things.  Involuntarily her heart
+fashioned the response he ought to give--"I shall have you left, Hylda."
+
+The air seemed to grow oppressive, and the instant's silence a torture,
+and, when he spoke, his words struck a chill to her heart--rough notes of
+pain.  "I have not lost yet," were his words.
+
+She shrank.  "You will not hide it.  You will do right by--by him," she
+said with difficulty.
+
+"Let him establish his claim to the last item of fact," he said with
+savage hate.
+
+"Luke Claridge knew.  The proofs are but just across the way, no doubt,"
+she answered, almost coldly, so had his words congealed her heart.
+
+Their great moment had passed.  It was as though a cord had snapped that
+held her to him, and in the recoil she had been thrown far off from him.
+Swift as his mind worked, it had not seen his opportunity to win her to
+his cause, to asphyxiate her high senses, her quixotic justice, by that
+old flood of eloquence and compelling persuasion of the emotions with
+which he had swept her to the altar--an altar of sacrifice.  He had not
+even done what he had left London to do--make sure of her, by an alluring
+flattery and devotion, no difficult duty with one so beautiful and
+desirable; though neither love of beauty nor great desire was strong
+enough in him to divert him from his course for an hour, save by his own
+initiative.  His mother's letter had changed it all.  A few hours before
+he had had a struggle with Soolsby, and now another struggle on the same
+theme was here.  Fate had dealt illy with him, who had ever been its
+spoiled child and favourite.  He had not learned yet the arts of defence
+against adversity.
+
+"Luke Claridge is dead," he answered sharply.  "But you will tell--him,
+you will write to Egypt and tell your brother?" she said, the conviction
+slowly coming to her that he would not.
+
+"It is not my duty to displace myself, to furnish evidence against
+myself--"
+
+"You have destroyed the evidence," she intervened, a little scornfully.
+
+"If there were no more than that--" He shrugged his shoulders
+impatiently.
+
+"Do you know there is more?" she asked searchingly.  "In whose interests
+are you speaking?" he rejoined, with a sneer.  A sudden fury possessed
+him.  Claridge Pasha--she was thinking of him!
+
+"In yours--your conscience, your honour."
+
+"There is over thirty years' possession on my side," he rejoined.
+
+"It is not as if it were going from your family," she argued.
+
+"Family--what is he to me!"
+
+"What is any one to you?" she returned bitterly.
+
+"I am not going to unravel a mystery in order to facilitate the cutting
+of my own throat."
+
+"It might be worth while to do something once for another's sake than
+your own--it would break the monotony," she retorted, all her sense
+tortured by his words, and even more so by his manner.
+
+Long ago Faith had said in Soolsby's but that he "blandished" all with
+whom he came in contact; but Hylda realised with a lacerated heart that
+he had ceased to blandish her.  Possession had altered that.  Yet how had
+he vowed to her in those sweet tempestuous days of his courtship when the
+wind of his passion blew so hard!  Had one of the vows been kept?
+
+Even as she looked at him now, words she had read some days before
+flashed through her mind--they had burnt themselves into her brain:
+
+                   "Broken faith is the crown of evils,
+                    Broken vows are the knotted thongs
+                    Set in the hands of laughing devils,
+                    To scourge us for deep wrongs.
+
+                   "Broken hearts, when all is ended,
+                    Bear the better all after-stings;
+                    Bruised once, the citadel mended,
+                    Standeth through all things."
+
+Suddenly he turned upon her with aggrieved petulance.  "Why are you so
+eager for proof?"
+
+"Oh, I have," she said, with a sudden flood of tears in her voice, though
+her eyes were dry--"I have the feeling your mother had, that nothing will
+be well until you undo the wrong your father did.  I know it was not your
+fault.  I feel for you--oh, believe me, I feel as I have never felt,
+could never feel, for myself.  It was brought on you by your father,
+but you must be the more innocent because he was so guilty.  You have had
+much out of it, it has helped you on your way.  It does not mean so much
+now.  By-and-by another--an English-peerage may be yours by your own
+achievement.  Let it go.  There is so much left, Harry.  It is a small
+thing in a world of work.  It means nothing to me."  Once again, even
+when she had given up all hope, seeing what was the bent of his mind--
+once again she made essay to win him out of his selfishness.  If he would
+only say, "I have you left," how she would strive to shut all else out of
+her life!
+
+He was exasperated.  His usual prescience and prudence forsook him.  It
+angered him that she should press him to an act of sacrifice for the man
+who had so great an influence upon her.  Perversity possessed him.
+Lifelong egotism was too strong for wisdom, or discretion.
+
+Suddenly he caught her hands in both of his and said hoarsely: "Do you
+love me--answer me, do you love me with all your heart and soul?  The
+truth now, as though it were your last word on earth."
+
+Always self.  She had asked, if not in so many words, for a little love,
+something for herself to feed on in the darkening days for him, for her,
+for both; and he was thinking only of himself.
+
+She shrank, but her hands lay passive in his.  "No, not with all my heart
+and soul--but, oh--!"
+
+He flung her hands from him.  "No, not with all your heart and soul--
+I know!  You are willing to sacrifice me for him, and you think I do not
+understand."
+
+She drew herself up, with burning cheeks and flashing eyes.  "You
+understand nothing--nothing.  If you had ever understood me, or any human
+being, or any human heart, you would not have ruined all that might have
+given you an undying love, something that would have followed you through
+fire and flood to the grave.  You cannot love.  You do not understand
+love.  Self--self, always self.  Oh, you are mad, mad, to have thrown it
+all away, all that might have given happiness!  All that I have, all that
+I am, has been at your service; everything has been bent and tuned to
+your pleasure, for your good.  All has been done for you, with thought
+of you and your position and your advancement, and now--now, when you
+have killed all that might have been yours, you cry out in anger that it
+is dying, and you insinuate what you should kill another for insinuating.
+Oh, the wicked, cruel folly of it all!  You suggest--you dare!  I never
+heard a word from David Claridge that might not be written on the
+hoardings.  His honour is deeper than that which might attach to the
+title of Earl of Eglington."
+
+She seemed to tower above him.  For an instant she looked him in the eyes
+with frigid dignity, but a great scorn in her face.  Then she went to the
+door--he hastened to open it for her.
+
+"You will be very sorry for this," he said stubbornly.  He was too
+dumfounded to be discreet, too suddenly embarrassed by the turn affairs
+had taken.  He realised too late that he had made a mistake, that he had
+lost his hold upon her.
+
+As she passed through, there suddenly flashed before her mind the scene
+in the laboratory with the chairmaker.  She felt the meaning of it now.
+
+"You do not intend to tell him--perhaps Soolsby has done so," she said
+keenly, and moved on to the staircase.
+
+He was thunderstruck at her intuition.  "Why do you want to rob
+yourself?" he asked after her vaguely.  She turned back.  "Think of your
+mother's letter that you destroyed," she rejoined solemnly and quietly.
+"Was it right?"
+
+He shut the door, and threw himself into a chair.  "I will put it
+straight with her to-morrow," he said helplessly.
+
+He sat for a half-hour silent, planning his course.
+
+At last there came a tap at the door, and the butler appeared.
+
+"Some one from the Foreign Office, my lord," he said.  A moment
+afterwards a young official, his subordinate, entered.  "There's the
+deuce to pay in Egypt, sir; I've brought the despatch," he said.
+
+
+
+
+GLOSSARY
+
+Aiwa----Yes.
+Allah hu Achbar----God is most Great.
+Al'mah----Female professional singers, signifying "a learned female."
+Ardab----A measure equivalent to five English bushels.
+
+Backsheesh----Tip, douceur.
+Balass----Earthen vessel for carrying water.
+Bdsha----Pasha.
+Bersim----Clover.
+Bismillah----In the name of God.
+Bowdb----A doorkeeper.
+
+Dahabieh----A Nile houseboat with large lateen sails.
+Darabukkeh----A drum made of a skin stretched over an earthenware funnel.
+Dourha----Maize.
+
+Effendina----Most noble.
+El Azhar----The Arab University at Cairo.
+
+Fedddn----A measure of land representing about an acre.
+Fellah----The Egyptian peasant.
+
+Ghiassa----Small boat.
+
+Hakim----Doctor.
+Hasheesh----Leaves of hemp.
+
+Inshallah----God willing.
+
+Kdnoon----A musical instrument like a dulcimer.
+Kavass----An orderly.
+Kemengeh----A cocoanut fiddle.
+Khamsin----A hot wind of Egypt and the Soudan.
+
+Kourbash----A whip, often made of rhinoceros hide.
+
+La ilaha illa-llah----There is no deity but God.
+
+Malaish----No matter.
+Malboos----Demented.
+Mastaba----A bench.
+Medjidie----A Turkish Order.
+Mooshrabieh----Lattice window.
+Moufettish----High Steward.
+Mudir----The Governor of a
+Mudirieh, or province.
+Muezzin----The sheikh of the mosque who calls to prayer.
+
+Narghileh----A Persian pipe.
+Nebool----A quarter-staff.
+
+Ramadan----The Mahommedan season of fasting.
+
+Saadat-el-bdsha----Excellency Pasha.
+Sdis----Groom.
+Sakkia----The Persian water-wheel.
+Salaam----Eastern salutation.
+Sheikh-el-beled----Head of a village.
+
+Tarboosh----A Turkish turban.
+
+Ulema----Learned men.
+
+Wakf----Mahommedan Court dealing with succession, etc.
+Welee----A holy man or saint.
+
+Yashmak----A veil for the lower part of the face.
+Yelek----A long vest or smock.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+A cloak of words to cover up the real thought behind
+Antipathy of the lesser to the greater nature
+Antipathy of the man in the wrong to the man in the right
+Friendship means a giving and a getting
+He's a barber-shop philosopher
+Monotonously intelligent
+No virtue in not falling, when you're not tempted
+Of course I've hated, or I wouldn't be worth a button
+Only the supremely wise or the deeply ignorant who never alter
+Passion to forget themselves
+Political virtue goes unrewarded
+She knew what to say and what to leave unsaid
+Smiling was part of his equipment
+Sometimes the longest way round is the shortest way home
+Soul tortured through different degrees of misunderstanding
+The vague pain of suffered indifference
+There's no credit in not doing what you don't want to do
+Tricks played by Fact to discredit the imagination
+We must live our dark hours alone
+Woman's deepest right and joy and pain in one--to comfort
+
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WEAVERS BY PARKER, V3 ***
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