TWO MEN:

A ROMANCE OF SUSSEX

BY

ALFRED OLLIVANT

Necessity the Spring of Faith
and Mould of Character

GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1919

Copyright, 1919, by
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
All rights reserved, including that of
translation into foreign languages,
including the Scandinavian

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Bob, Son of Battle
Danny
The Gentleman
Redcoat Captain
The Taming of John Blunt
The Royal Road
The Brown Mare
Boy Woodburn

TO
BEACHBOURNE
AND THE FRIENDS I MADE THERE
1901-1911

CONTENTS

BEAU-NEZ

BOOK I

FATHER AND SON

CHAPTER

I   Mr. Trupp
II   Edward Caspar
III   Anne Caspar
IV   Old Man Caspar
V   Ernie Makes His Appearance
VI   The Manor-House
VII   Hans Caspar's Will

BOOK II

THE TWO BROTHERS

VIII   Beachbourne
IX   The Two Boys
X   Old and New
XI   The Study
XII   Alf Shows His Colours
XIII   Alf Makes a Remark
XIV   Evil
XV   Mr. Trupp Introduces the Lash
XVI   Father, Mother and Son
XVII   Ernie Goes for a Soldier

BOOK III

THE SOLDIER

XVIII   Ernie Goes East
XIX   The Regiment
XX   Ernie in India
XXI   The Return of the Soldier
XXII   Old Town
XXIII   The Changed Man
XXIV   Alf
XXV   The Churchman
XXVI   Mr. Pigott

BOOK IV

RUTH BOAM

XXVII   The Hohenzollern Hotel
XXVIII   The Third Floor
XXIX   The Man of Affairs
XXX   Reality
XXXI   The Ride on the Bus
XXXII   On The Hill
XXXIII   Under the Stars

BOOK V

CAPTAIN ROYAL

XXXIV   His Arrival
XXXV   His Origin
XXXVI   The Captain Begins His Siege
XXXVII   He Drives a Sap
XXXVIII   The Serpent
XXXIX   The Lash Again
XL   Clash of Males
XLI   The Decoy Pond
XLII   The Captain's Flight
XLIII   The Ebb-Tide
XLIV   Ernie Leaves the Hotel

BOOK VI

THE QUEST

XLV   Old Mus Boam
XLVI   Ernie Turns Philosopher
XLVII   Alf Tries to Help
XLVIII   Two Meetings
XLIX   Alf Marks Time

BOOK VII

THE OUTCAST

L   The Crumbles
LI   Evelyn Trupp
LII   The Return of the Outcast
LIII   The Find
LIV   The Brooks

BOOK VIII

TREASURE TROVE

LV   The Pool
LVI   Frogs' Hall
LVII   The Surprise
LVIII   The Dower-House
LIX   Alf Tries to Save a Soul
LX   The End of a Chapter

BEAU-NEZ
BOOK I
FATHER AND SON

TWO MEN

Old Beau-Nez shouldered out into the sea, immense, immovable, as when the North-men, tossing off him in their long-boats, had first named him a thousand years before.

Like a lion asleep athwart the doors of light, his head massive upon his paws, his flanks smooth as marble, he rested.

The sea broke petulantly and in vain against the boulders that strewed his feet. He lay squandered in the sunshine that filled the hollows in his back and declared the lines of his ribs gaunt beneath the pelt.

Overhead larks poured down rivulets of song from the brimming bowl of heaven. The long-drawn swish of the sea, a sonorous under-current that came and went in rhythmical monotone, rose from the foot of the cliff to meet the silvery rain of sound and mingle with it in deep and mysterious harmony.

It was May. The sides of the coombes were covered with cloth of gold: for the gorse was in glory, and filled the air with heavy fragrance; while the turf, sweet with thyme, was bejewelled with a myriad variety of tiny flowers.

In earth and sea and sky there was a universal murmuring content, as though after labour, enduring for æons, the Mother of Time had at last brought forth her Son and, as she nursed him, crooned her thankfulness.

Out of the West, along the back of the Downs, dipping and dancing to the curve of the land like the wake of a ship over a billowy sea, a rough road swept up to the head, passing a dew-pond, the old race-course still fenced in, and a farm amid stacks at the head of a long valley that curled away towards a lighthouse pricking up white against the blue on the summit of the cliff in the eye of the misty morning sun.

The name of the lighthouse was Bel- or Baal-tout, reminding men by its title of the god their fathers worshipped on high places here and elsewhere throughout the world with human sacrifices—the god of the Philistine of every age and country, and not least our own.

On Beau-nez itself a tall flagstaff overtopped a little cluster of white coast-guard stations, outside which a tethered goat grazed.

Beside the flagstaff stood a man, watching a tan-sailed Thames barge leisurely flapping across the shining floor of water beneath.

He too was massive: a big man with swarthy eyes set in a pale face, very sure of himself. So much you could tell by the carriage of his head, and the way he stood on his feet. He was not used to opposition, it was clear, and would not brook it; while the coat with the astrakhan collar he was wearing added to his air of consequence.

Behind him in the road stood the dingy fly and moth-eaten horse that had brought him up the hill.

The big man turned his back on the sun and walked slowly to the top of the steep coombe which overlooked the town that lay beneath him like a fairy city in the mists along the foam-lined edge of the bay, reaching out over the Levels to the East, and flinging its red-coated skirmishers up the lower slopes of the Downs.

"How the town grows!" mused the big man.

A brown excrescence on the smooth turf of the coombe beneath him caught his eye. At first he mistook it for a badger's earth; then he saw that it was a man lying on his back. The man's hands were behind his head, and his soft hat over his eyes; but he was not sleeping. One lank leg was crossed over a crooked knee, and the dangling foot kicked restlessly to and fro.

That foot was sandalled.

The man in the astrakhan coat slowly descended towards the recumbent figure. His eyes were ironical, his expression almost grim.

For a moment he stood looking down upon the unconscious dreamer whose pale brown hair peeped from beneath a hat of a shape more familiar in the Quartier Latin than on English shores.

Then he prodded the other in the side with his toe.

The young fellow roused with a start and blinked up into the big man's face.

"Hullo, f—father," he cried with a slight stutter, and rose in perturbation: a ramshackle young fellow, taller even than his father, but entirely lacking the other's girth and authoritative presence. A soft beard framed his long face, and he was wearing the low flannel collar that in the seventies was the height of bad form.

"Just like you, Ned," said the elder with a grimness that was not entirely unkind.

The son bent and brushed his knees unnecessarily. His face twitched, but he did not attempt to answer.

"Your mother's very ill," said the big man casually. He took a letter from his pocket and thrust it towards his son.

The young man read it and handed it back.

"Is she h—happy?" he asked, his face moved and moving.

"She's away all the time—like her son," the other answered; and added more mildly—"She doesn't know any one now—not even the latest parson." He turned and climbed the hill again.

On the summit by the flagstaff he paused and looked round deliberately.

"Might build an hotel here," he said thoughtfully. "Should pay."

When in the late seventies young Mr. Trupp, abandoning the use of Lister's spray, but with meticulous antiseptic precautions derived from the great man at University Hospital, performed the operation of variotomy on the daughter of Sir Hector Moray, and she lived, his friends called it a miracle, his enemies a lucky fluke.

All were agreed that it had never been done before, and the more foolish added that it would never be done again.

Sir Hector was a well-known soldier; and the operation made the growing reputation of the man who performed it.

William Trupp was registrar at the Whitechapel at the time, and a certainty for the next staff appointment. When, therefore, while the columns of the Lancet were still hot with the controversy that raged round the famous case, the young man told Sir Audrey Rivers, whose house-surgeon he had been, that he meant to leave London and migrate to the country, the great orthopædist had said in his grim way to this his favourite pupil:

"If you do, I'll never send you a patient."

Even in his young days Mr. Trupp was remarkable for the gruff geniality which characterized him to the end.

"Very well, sir," he said with that shrewd smile of his. "I must go all the same."

Next day Sir Audrey read that his understudy was engaged to Evelyn, only daughter of Sir Hector Moray of Pole.

Evelyn Moray came of warrior ancestry; and her father, known on the North-West Frontier as Mohmund Moray, was not the least distinguished of his line. The family had won their title as Imperialists, not on the platform, but by generations of laborious service in the uttermost marches of the Empire. The Morays were in fact one of those rare families of working aristocrats, which through all the insincerities of Victorian times remained true to the old knightly ideal of service as the only test of leadership.

Evelyn then had been brought up in a spacious atmosphere of high endeavour and chivalrous gaiety remote indeed from the dull and narrow circumstance of her lover's origin. Profoundly aware of it, the young man was determined that his lady should not suffer as the result of her choice.

Moreover he loved the sea; he loved sport; and, not least, he was something of a natural philosopher. That is to say, he cherished secret dreams as to the part his profession was to play in that gradual Ascent of Man which Darwin had recently revealed to the young men of William Trupp's generation. Moreover he held certain theories as to the practice of his profession, which he could never work out in Harley Street. It was his hope to devote his life to a campaign against that enemy of the human race—the tubercle bacillus. And to the realization of his plans the sea and open spaces were necessary.

A colleague at the Whitechapel, who was his confidant, said one day:—

"Why don't you look at Beachbourne? It's a coming town. And you get the sea and the Downs. It's ideal for your purpose."

"It's so new," protested the young surgeon. "I can't take that girl out of that home and plant her down in a raw place like Beachbourne. She'd perish like a violet in Commercial Road."

"There's an Old Town," replied the other....

In those days, Mr. Trupp kept greyhounds at the Pelham Arms, Lewes, and spent his Saturday afternoon scampering about Furrel Beacon and High-'nd-Over and the flanks of the hills above Aldwoldston and the Ruther Valley.

In the evening, after his sport, he would ride over to spend the night at Pole, which lay "up country," as the shepherds and carters in the Down villages still called the Weald.

One spring evening he arrived very late by gig instead of on horseback, and coming from the East instead of from the South. The beautiful girl, awaiting him somewhat coldly at the gate, was about to chide him, when she saw his face; and her frosts melted in a moment.

"My dear," he said, dismounting and taking her by both hands, "I've done it."

"What have you done?" she cried, a-gleam like an April evening after rain.

"Taken the Manor-house at Beachbourne."

Six months later Mr. Trupp was settled in his home, with for capital the love of a woman who believed in him, his own natural capacity and shrewd common sense, and a blue

The days when the parish priest knew the secrets of every family within his cure have long gone by, never to return.

His place in the last generation has been taken to a great extent by the family doctor, who in his turn perhaps will give way to the psycho-therapist in the generation to come.

Mr. Trupp had not been long in Beachbourne before he began to know something of the inner histories of many of the families about him. Those shrewd eyes of his, peering short-sightedly through pince-nez as he rolled about the steep streets of Old Town, or drove in his hooded gig along the broad esplanades of New, allowed little to escape them. Moreover he was a man of singular discretion; and his fellow citizens, men alike and women, learned soon to trust him and never had cause to regret their confidence.

It was quite in the early days of his residence in the little township on the hill that the young surgeon received a letter from Mr. Caspar, the famous railway contractor, asking him to look after—my boy, Ned, who has seen good to pitch his tent on your accursed Downs—heaven knows why.

Hans Caspar owed his immense success in life as much to his habit of almost brutal directness as to anything, save perhaps his equally brutal energy.

A Governor of the Whitechapel Hospital, and a regular attendant at the Board-meetings, he knew the young surgeon well, believed in him, and did not hesitate to tell the naked truth about his son.

He's not a scamp, he wrote. Nobody could say that of Ned. He's got no enemies but himself. You know his trouble. His address is 60, Rectory Walk. Look him up. He won't come to you—shy as a roe-deer. But once you're established connection he'll love you like a dog. I've told him I'm sending you.

In a postscript he added,

I'll foot the bill. I keep the boy mighty short. It's the one thing I can do to help him.

Mr. Trupp, in those days none too busy, went....

The Manor, a solid Queen Anne house, fronted on to the street opposite the black-timbered Star, where of old pilgrims who had landed from the continent at Pevensey would, after a visit to Holy Well in Coombe-in-the-Cliff under Beau-nez, pass their first night before taking the green-way that led along the top of the Downs to the Lamb at Aldwoldston on the road to the shrine of good St. Richard-de-la-Wych at Chichester.

Mr. Trupp, muffled to the chin—for even in those days he was cultivating the cold which he was to cherish to the end—climbed Church Street, little changed for centuries, passed the massive-towered St. Michael's on the Kneb, and turned to the left at Billing's Corner. Here at once were evidences of the change that had driven Squire Caryll to forsake the home of his fathers and retreat westward to the valley of the Ruther before the onrush of those he called the barbarians.

"They've squeezed me out, the ——!" the old man said with tears in his eyes. "But, by God, I've made em pay!"

The Manor farm had been cut up into building lots; the Moot, as the land under the Kneb crowned by the parish-church was still called, would shortly follow suit; and Saffrons Croft, with its glory of great elms that stood like a noble tapestry between the Downs and the sea, was being turned by a progressive Town Council into a public park.

At the back of Church Street old and new met and clashed unhappily; a walnut peeping amid houses, an ancient fig tree prisoned in a back yard, a length of grim flint wall patching red brick.

Here a row of substantial blue-slated houses, larger than cottages, less pretentious than villas, each with its tiny garden characteristic of its occupant, stood at right angle to the Downs and looked across open ground to Beech-hangar and the spur which hides Beau-nez from view. A white house across the way, standing apart in pharisaic aloofness amid a gloom of unhappy-seeming trees, told that this was Rectory Walk. At the end of the Walk a new road set a boundary to the town. Beyond the road a dark crescent-sea of cultivated land washed the foot of the Downs which rose here steep as a green curtain, shutting off with radiant darkness the wonder-world that lay beyond in the light of setting suns.

No. 60 was almost opposite the Rectory.

Mr. Trupp, as he entered the gate, remarked that in the upper window of the house there was a chocolate coloured card, on which was printed in deep grooved silver letters the word Apartments.

A woman opened to him, but kept the door upon the chain. Through the crack he glanced at her, and saw at once that but for her hardness she would have been beautiful, while even in her hardness there was something of the quality of a sword.

"Is Mr. Caspar in?" he asked.

"Yes," she answered.

Whether the woman was surly or suspicious, he wasn't sure; but she undid the chain.

"Will you step inside?" she said, thawing ever so little. "Mr. Trupp, isn't it?"

She stood back to let him pass. Her blue overall, falling straight to her feet, showed the fine lines of her figure; her eyes met his straight as the point of a lance and much the colour of one; her lips were fine almost to cruelty, her nose fine; she was fine all through as an aristocrat, if her accent and manner were those of a small shop-keeper; and her colouring was of finest porcelain.

She showed him into the room upon the right.

The room was unusual. There was little furniture in it, and that little exquisite; no carpet, but a lovely Persian rug lay before the fire. All round the walls and half-way up them, were oak book-shelves with glass doors of a pattern new to Mr. Trupp, but designed he was sure in Germany. On the top of one of them was a Jacobean tankard with a crest upon it; in the bow a broad writing-table with the new roll-top. On the brown wall were two pictures, both familiar to the young surgeon who was interested in Art and knew something of it: Botticelli's Primavera and a perfect print of young Peter Lely's famous Cavalier—Raoul Beauregard, the long-faced languorous first Earl Ravenwood, who died so beautifully in his master's arms at Naseby.

"I had rather lost my crown," the stricken monarch had remarked, so we all as children read in our nursery histories.

"Sire," the wounded man had answered. "You are losing little. I am gaining all...."

As Mr. Trupp entered, a very tall man, smoking by the fireside, put down a volume of Swinburne, and rose. He was as unusual as the room in which he lived. Young though he was, he had a soft brown beard that suited his weak and charming face and served partially to hide an uncertain mouth and chin. It was noon, but he was wearing slippers and a quilted dressing gown, with the arms of a famous Cambridge College worked in silk on the breast-pocket. Certainly he was hardly the type you expected to find in the little room of a tiny house in a backwater of a seaside resort.

His long face had something of the contour of a sheep, and something of a sheep's expression. In a flash of recognition Mr. Trupp glanced from it to that of the love-locked cavalier on the wall above his head. Edward Caspar too had those unforgettable eyes—shy, fugitive, and above all far too sensitive. He had, moreover, the delightful ease of manner of one who has been bred at the most ancient of public schools and universities and has responded to the somewhat stagnant atmosphere of those old-world treasuries of dignity and peace. But a less shrewd eye than Mr. Trupp's would have detected behind the apparent assurance a complete lack of self-confidence.

"My father tut—tut—told me you were going to be kind enough to lul—lul—look me up," the young man said with a stutter in the perfect intonation of his kind. "It's good of you to come."

"Just looked in for a chat," growled Mr. Trupp, unusually shy for some reason.

The two young men talked awhile at random—of the Hospital, of Mr. Caspar Senior and the Grand Northern Railway, of Beachbourne, old and new, its origin, growth, and prospects.

Then conversation flagged.

Edward Caspar, it was clear, was trying to say something and found it difficult. He stood before the fire, wrapping his dressing-gown about him, and moving elephant-wise from one foot to the other. His brow puckered; his face wrought; his eyes were on the floor.

Mr. Trupp, intuitive and sympathetic as few would have believed, gave him every chance and mute encouragement.

At last the thing came out.

"You know what my tut—tut—trouble is," said the young man, over-riding obstacles with motions of the head. "I find it hard to keep off it." He nodded to the writing-desk on which stood a soda-water syphon and a glass.

"We must see what can be done," the other answered. "You're young. You've got life before you. It's worth making a fight."

The young man showed himself troubled and eager as a child.

"D'you think there's hup—hup—hope for me?" he asked.

"Every hope," replied Mr. Trupp with the gruff cheerfulness that so often surprised his patients. "You're honest with yourself. That's the main thing. First thing we must do is to find you a job."

The other stared into the fire.

"I've got a job," he said at last reluctantly.

"What's that?"

Edward Caspar answered after a pause and much facial emotion.

"I'm writing a book on the Philosophy of M—Mysticism." He wound himself up and his speech flowed more freely. "It'll take me my lifetime. Professor Zweibrucker of Leipzig is helping me. That's why I've settled here. At least," he corrected, stumbling once again, "that's one reason why. To be quiet and near the Public Library."

Mr. Trupp nodded.

"It's the best in the South of England bar Brighton," he said. "And it'll beat that soon." He rose to go.

"Does that woman look after you properly?" he asked.

The young man's colour changed; and the momentary glow of enthusiasm roused in him as he touched on his work vanished. Edward Caspar was too weak or too honest to make a good conspirator.

He became self-conscious, and blinked rapidly as he stared at the fire.

"What—wow—woman's that?" he asked in a flustered way.

"Your landlady."

The other's face wrought. His stammer possessed him. He flapped about like a wounded bird in a tumult of fear and pain.

"What?" he said. "She?—She's all right."

He did not show his visitor to the door. Mr. Trupp noticed it and wondered: for his host's manners were obviously perfect both by nature and tradition.

In the passage was the woman who had admitted him, feigning to dust. She opened the door for him as he wound himself elaborately up in his muffler.

"D'you let lodgings?" he asked.

Those steel blue eyes of hers were on him challenging and armed for resistance.

"He's my lodger."

"Yes," said Mr. Trupp. "But have you other rooms? I see your card's up."

"Sometimes."

"Because my patients ask me now and then if I can recommend them lodgings."

The woman was clearly resentful rather than grateful.

Mr. Trupp, amused, pursued his mild persecution with the glee of the tormenting male.

"Let me see. What's your name?"

For a second the woman hesitated—baffled it seemed and fighting. Then she said with a note of obvious relief as of one who has overcome a difficulty.

"Anne, I believe."

"Thank you, Mrs. Anne, I'll remember."

He rolled on his way chuckling to himself.

The woman watched his back suspiciously from the door.

Then she retired, not into the kitchen, but into her lodger's sitting-room.

"Your father's spy," she said tartly.

"Nonsense, nonsense," the young man answered with the desperate exasperation of the neurotic. "My f—father's not like that."

Edward Caspar, something of the scholar, something of the artist, even a little of the saint, was notoriously bad at keeping secrets.

"Old Ned leaks," his friends at Harrow and Trinity used to say. The charge was unfortunately true. It was because he had a secret it was important he should keep that, knowing his own weakness, he had settled in Old Town, to be out of danger.

Up there on the hill he would meet none of his quondam friends, who, if they came to Beachbourne at all, would go to one of the fine hotels in New Town along the sea front by the Wish.

But Nature, which has no mercy on weakness in any form, was too much for the soft young man.

It was barely a week after his first visit to 60 Rectory Walk that Mr. Trupp was sent for again.

The same woman opened to him with the same fierce, almost defiant face.

"Well?" he said.

"It's pleurisy, he says," she answered. "Pretty sharp."

He unwound himself in the passage.

"He may want a nurse then."

"He won't," cried the woman, the note of challenge in her voice. "I'll nurse him."

"Can you manage it—with your work?"

"If I can't no one else shan't," the woman snorted, almost threateningly. "First door on the left."

Mr. Trupp, grinning to himself, went up the stairs, and was aware that the woman was standing at the foot watching his back. She did not follow.

The young surgeon climbed thoughtfully, absorbing his environment, as the good doctor does. The varnished paper on the wall, the cheap carpet under his feet, the sham drain-pipe that served as an umbrella-stand in the passage; they were all the ordinary appurtenances of the house of this class, commonplace, even a little coarse, and affording a strange contrast to the almost exotic refinement and distinction of the sitting-room on the ground floor. The house too was bright and clean as a hospital, hard too, he thought, as its landlady. There was no lodging-house smell, his nose, trained in the great wards of the Whitechapel, noted with approval. Windows were kept clearly open, sunshine admitted as a friend. He trailed his fingers up the bannisters and examined them, when he had turned the corner and was out of sight of the woman watching in the passage. Not a trace of dust! Yes, when he was in a position to start his Open-air Hostel on the cliff for tuberculous patients, this was the woman he should get for housekeeper.

He knocked at the door on the left, suddenly remembering that this must be the room in the window of which hung the chocolate-coloured Apartments card.

Young Caspar's voice bid him enter.

The room was a bed-room and contained a double bed. In the window, where dangled the card, was a dressing-table, and on it, undisguised, the paraphernalia of a woman's toilet.

Edward Caspar lay in bed, breathing shortly, his face pinched with physical and spiritual suffering.

Beside the bed was a chair and on it a manuscript.

Mr. Trupp glanced at the inscription—The Philosophy of Mysticism. Part I. The History of Animism.

"You've fuf—fuf—found us out early," gasped the young man with a ghastly smile.

"Nothing very terrible," said Mr. Trupp.

"I'm not ashamed of it," answered the other. "She's a good woman. Only my f—father's a bit old-fashioned. You see, I'm the only son."

"I don't suppose he knows," grunted Mr. Trupp.

"No, he don't know."

"And I don't see any reason why he should," continued the doctor.

Edward Caspar raised his wistful eyes.

"Thank you, Mr. Trupp," he stuttered in his pathetic and dependent way. "Thank you. Very good of you, I'm sure. We're fond of each other, Anne and I. I owe her a lot. And my father's getting an old man."

On the mantelpiece was the photograph of a lady in court dress. Mr. Trupp studied the long and refined face. There was no mistaking the type. It was Beauregard all through, exhibiting the same sheep-like contour as that of the man in the bed, the same unquenchable spiritual longings as the Cavalier in the room below—added in this case to that exasperating weakness which provokes a pagan world to blows.

"Is that your mother?" asked Mr. Trupp.

"Yes."

"She's like you."

"She's supposed to be."

When the doctor left the sick room and went downstairs he was aware that the door of the sitting-room was open.

The woman was inside, standing duster in hand, under the picture of the Cavalier, whose eyes seemed now to the young doctor faintly ironical.

Mr. Trupp entered quietly and shut the door behind him.

"We're married," she said, blurting the words at him.

"I know," he grunted.

She looked at him suspiciously.

"Did he tell you?"

"That you were married?"

"Yes."

"No."

"Who did?" fiercely.

"Your face."

She relaxed slowly.

"You mean I don't look the sort to stand any nonsense." She nodded, grimly amused. "You're right. That's me. I'm chapel." Then she let herself go. "I'm fond of Ned," she flashed. "I wouldn't have married him else, for all his family. He's reel gentry, Ned is. I don't mean his mother being Lady Blanche, I'm not that kind. I mean in him—here." She put her hand on her chest. "I know I'm not his sort. But I can help him. And he needs help. Think any of them could support him up?" with scorn. "Too flabby by half. Can't support emselves, some of em. Lays on their backs in bed and drinks tea out of a spout before they can get up o mornings. I know. My sister's in service." She stopped abruptly. "What do you think about it yourself? Straight now."

"I think," said Mr. Trupp, sententious and dour, "the only sensible thing he ever did in his life was to marry you."

She eyed him shrewdly, sweetly. Then the hard young woman softened, and her face became beautiful, the lovely colour deepening.

She was still wearing the blue over-all in which he had first seen her.

"You see me how I am," she said.

"I can guess," answered Mr. Trupp.

"Will you see me through?"

"With pleasure."

"I don't want no one else, only you. Mr. Pigott—the schoolmaster—told me of you."

Mr. Trupp nodded.

"He's chapel too," he said.

Her eyes became ironical.

"Yes," she answered. "He's a good man though. You'll be church, I suppose. Manor-house always is."

Mr. Trupp shook his head forcibly.

"I'm an agnostic," he replied. The word, recently coined by Huxley, was on the lips of all the young men of Science of the day. "That's a kind of honest heathen," he added, seeing she did not understand.

She nodded at him with a gleam of almost merry malice.

"Hope for the best and fear the worst sort," she said. "I know em."

Then she returned to her subject, and her face became grave and sweet again.

"I'm due in April," she said.

"That's the right time," he answered. "All children should be born in the spring. Then they're greeted with a song—because Nature wants em; and they've got the summer before them to get established in. I'll come and look you up in a day or two."

"And Ned?"

"He's all right. Keep him in bed. I'll send him round some medicine to ease the pain."

She eyed him shrewdly.

"I didn't mean that. I meant the big thing. What chance has he?"

Mr. Trupp buttoned himself up.

"He's honest with himself. That's the great thing. For the rest it depends mostly on you. You may pull him up. He's young. Is he ambitious?"

She shook her head.

"What about his writing?"

"The Basis of Animalism," said Mrs. Caspar thoughtfully. "That's the essay that got him the Fellowship at King's—only he gave it up after a year. Too drudgeryfied. See where it is," confidentially, "he's got the brains, Ned has. The teachers at Cambridge thought no end of him. I've seen their letters. You can do what you like,—the Head Teacher wrote. Question is—Do you like? And that's where it is with him. There's no stay in Ned. He'll write away one day, and then drop it for a month. Then he'll paint a bit; and after that a bit of poetry. But he don't go at it. He don't understand work. That sort don't," with scorn. "They've no need. A man works when he's got to—and not before. Dad worked. He was a tobacconist at Ealing in a small way. Cleared three pound a week if he kept at it steady and went under if he didn't. Why should a man work when he's only got to open his mouth and the pocket-money'll drop in. 'Tain't in Nature."

Mr. Trupp nodded quiet approval.

"Must's the only word that matters," he said. "Must's the man. He's the boy to kill your can't."

The woman followed him to the door.

"Of course if old Mr. Caspar knew he'd disinherit him. And Ned could never earn."

"And you'd be done?" queried Mr. Trupp with quiet glee.

"Never!" cried the woman, up in arms at once. "I could keep us both at a pinch, I'll lay then."

"I'll lay you could," answered the other. "But Mr. Caspar won't know, so you'll be all right."

The two lingered for a moment in the door, as do those who find themselves in sympathy.

"He's a hard un's Old Man Caspar," said Anne.

"And he's not the only one," grinned the young doctor. "And a good job too."

That was how it came about that Mr. Trupp helped young Ernie Caspar into the world. There was no doubt who the lad took after.

"He's his father's child," said the young surgeon.

Whether Mrs. Caspar was angry with her son for his resemblance to her husband, it was hard to say, but she was fierce even in her mothering.

Now she nodded at the photograph of the woman in court-dress upon the mantelpiece.

"It's her he favours," she said shortly, one stern eye on the sucking infant. "He's the spit of her—same as Ned. None of Old Man Caspar about him."

"Have you seen him?" asked Mr. Trupp, washing his hands.

"The Old Man?—Yes. Once. He came to lunch. Met Ned on Beau-nez. I was landlady that day." She nodded grimly at the window where hung the card. "That's why I keep that up—lest he should come down on us sudden. We're done if he finds us out."

Mr. Trupp grunted as he dried his hands.

"I'm not so sure," he said.

"Well, that's what Ned says," the woman retorted.

"He would," replied the surgeon.

She looked at him sharply.

"You mean Ned's afraid of the old man?"

The other didn't answer.

"You're right there," said the young mother. "He is. And I don't wonder. I'm afraid of him—and I've never feared a man before."

"Most people are," replied Mr. Trupp. "He's a bit of a terror; but he's got his points. You needn't worry," he added as he said good-bye. "You're not likely to see much of him. He's too busy with his Grand Northern Railway."

The woman was unconvinced.

"He's that sudden," she said. "There he was in the door—me in me wrapper and all. Of course Ned never give me no warning. Too flabbergasted by half. Learnt me a lesson, though, never to sit in the back-room with my sewing about."

"Did you know him?" asked Mr. Trupp, amused.

"Know him?" cried the other. "Seen his picture in the papers time and again. Astrakhan coat and all!"

Happily for the peace of mind of the young couple Mr. Trupp proved right. All the energies of the great contractor were set on driving the new commercial railway from London to the North, tapping the Black Country, and linking the Yorkshire ports with the Metropolis by the most direct route.

It was in fact two years and more before Mr. Caspar made another of his sudden appearances at the door of 60.

Young Mrs. Caspar, one of those women who is always on her guard, guessed her visitor by that peremptory knock. She dried her hands, shut the kitchen-door on the children—there were two now; peeped into the study, saw that Edward was out, and faced the stranger.

Old Mr. Caspar was not really old: a dark, powerful man, almost magnificent, in the familiar coat with the astrakhan collar of the picture papers, and a black-and-silvered beard.

A close observer would have detected a Semitic strain in him and more than a strain of the South. In fact, Hans Caspar's father came from Frankfurt and his mother from Trieste, though he had lived in England from his earliest years and spoke without a trace of accent.

Now his dark eyes met the woman's blue ones, and seemed to approve of what they saw.

"Mr. Edward Caspar in?" he asked.

"He will be in a moment.—Mr. Hans Caspar, isn't it?"

She showed him into the little back sitting-room.

Then the task before her was to warn her husband before he came blundering in and began to coo and call to her and the children from the passage.

Anne Caspar was always at her best in a crisis.

Her baby was asleep; and Ernie was happy bestriding a new hobby-horse and chanting to himself.

She took off her apron, put on her hat, and paused a moment on the door-step, looking up and down the road.

Which way had her husband gone?

Once a week or so he went down town to consult the Public Library. For the rest he always went towards the Downs to lose himself amid the hollows of the hills. She made for the huge green wall that blocked the end of the road, shimmering and mysterious in the April sunshine. Her choice proved right. She saw him coming off the hill above Beech-hangar, and went to meet him.

He would have blundered past her, oblivious of her presence but that she stopped him.

Briefly she told him the news and gave him his instructions.

They must not be seen entering the house together.

She would return directly to the house: he must go along the new Road, down Church Street at the back, and approach by way of Billing's Corner.

Obedient as a child, he lumbered off at that curious bear-like trot of his, his sandals tapping the pavement.

Ten minutes later, when he entered the back sitting-room, he was perspiring but as prepared as such a flabby soul could ever be.

He had always been in terror of his father; and Hans Caspar saw nothing strange in his son's greeting.

"Hullo, Edward," he said in his deep voice. "Just run down to see you."

"Hullo, father," replied the son with the forced cheeriness he always adopted when addressing his sire. "You'll stop for luncheon?"

"Thank-you. If you can give me a bite."

The young man rang.

His wife came to the door.

"Mr. Caspar'll stay for luncheon," said Edward, lowering his voice appropriately. "Can you let us have something?"

"Very good," replied his wife surlily.

The father looked after her, grimly amused.

"Don't seem very obliging," he remarked.

Edward laughed uneasily.

"What!" he said. "Oh, she's all right. A bit fuf—funny in her manner. That's all."

Mr. Caspar prodded his son.

"You'd better mind your eye, Ned. She's masterful, and a fine figure of a woman too."

Edward tittered foolishly.

"What?—Oh, she—she's married. Children and all that."

"What's her husband do?"

"What—him?—Oh, he does nothing much that I know of."

"Lives on her, I suppose," growled the other. "Scoundrel! I know the sort. The kind your Gladstones encourage."

He descanted at length and with more than even his usual violence on the sins of all governments and especially radical ones. Unlike his usual self, he was clearly talking as a screen to gain time, sheltering something behind a wall of words. Ned was always embarrassed in his father's presence; but for once Mr. Caspar seemed himself uneasy in the presence of this son who had been such a woeful disappointment to him.

After his political outburst, there was a prolonged pause.

Then Mr. Caspar leaned forward and kicked a cinder into its place.

"Pretty comfortable here?" he asked at last.

"Oh, I get along fuf—first-rate," answered the son.

"Three hundred a year's not much for a man in my position to allow his only son, I know," the other said gruffly.

It was a new and unexpected note. The young man, chivalrous to the roots of him, and heir to all the qualities of his mother's family, instantly answered his father's mute appeal.

"My dear fuf—father, it's a fortune," he said. "We—I live like a prince. And anyway, it's three hundred a year more than I deserve."

His father was silent.

"I don't know if you've had any expectations from me," he said at last. "I've been pretty blunt with you in the past."

The young man had risen and was standing before the fire, his face working.

"I've no need for mum—much money," he explained. "You see I've no expensive tastes. I don't hunt or shoot or gug—gamble. If I can have enough for the necessities of life, and to buy an occasional bub—book or two, that's all I need."

"Ned," said the other, coming firmly to the point, "I've made arrangements for the three hundred a year I allow you to be continued throughout your life."

"I think it's mum—most awfully good of you, father," said the young man with obvious sincerity.

The other grunted.

"I don't know," he replied. "Not every son would take it that way."

He was rarely moved. His son saw it and was wretched.

Then the woman came in with luncheon.

The little room in which they lunched looked out on a tiny back-garden bounded by a high old flint-wall.

The view was limited; and yet, for those who knew, it contained much of the history of Beachbourne. Over the top of the wall could be seen the chimney-pots and long blue roofs of what was now the Workhouse, which had, Ned told his father, been a cavalry barracks in the days of Napoleon. Against the wall a fine fig-tree revealed that the new house stood where not long since an old garden, its soil enriched by centuries of the toil of man, had grown the pleasant fruits of the earth.

The room was dark but singularly clean. It was distinguished, moreover, by the complete absence of all the ordinary insignia of a lodging-house. There were no pictures on the walls. The furniture, what there was of it, was mahogany, solid and plain, the chairs and sofa horse-hair.

If the room lacked the distinction and delicacy of the study, neither was it stamped as was the rest of the house with the conventional hall-mark of the lower middle class. Rather, in its strength and its simplicity it was like the parlour of a yeoman-farmer.

The two men talked little at their meal; but all went well until they had resumed their chairs in the sunny front sitting-room that looked over to the solitary stucco house, gloomy amid trees and evergreens, behind a high wall across the road.

"The Rectory, I suppose," said the older man, standing in the bow, picking his teeth. "Always the best house in the parish. D'you know the man?"

"Just," Edward answered.

"What's his sort?"

"Oh, the ordinary cleric. A bit of a pagan; a bit of a Pharisee; and a whole-hearted snob. He's a Prebendary who insists on being called a Canon."

His father flashed a twinkling eye at him. Just sometimes Hans Caspar wondered whether there might not be more in this poor creature of a son of his than appeared.

"How like em!" he mused. "Yet I've an immense admiration for the Church as a commercial concern. Look at the business they've built up. Look at the property they've accumulated. Look at the way the Ecclesiastical Commissioners sweat blood out of the foulest slums in Christendom. They deserve to succeed. Do it all in such style too. House their head-managers in palaces, and pay em £15,000 a year—and perks—and plenty of em. The Hanseatic League was nothing to em."

The young man's eyes became quizzical. Then he began to titter in the feeble and deprecatory way of one who half dissents and dares not say so.

The door opened quietly. Hans Caspar, standing in the bow, turned round.

A small brown-smocked figure, a-stride a dappled grey horse, looked in; and a lovely little singing voice like that of water pouring from a jug, said in a slight stutter with mysterious intimacy,

"Daddy!"

The little lad stood smiling in the door, the image of his father, of his father's mother, of the Cavalier upon the wall, of those high-bred, rather ineffective faces that look down on visitors from the famous portrait-gallery at Ravensrood, the Somersetshire home of the Beauregards.

Edward Caspar sat and sweated.

It was of course the elder man who spoke first.

"Hullo, youngster!" he called cheerily. "What might be your name?"

The child's face wrought just like his father's, as he struggled with some invisible obstacle.

"Ernie Gug—gug—Gaspod," he said at last.

"Ernie Gaspipe," laughed the other. "Is your daddy a plumber?"

The child's hand left his horse's mane and shot out a chubby finger.

"That's my dad—daddy," he said.

There was the sound of swift feet in the passage, a blue arm reached fiercely forth, and the child was swept back to the kitchen.

Mr. Caspar's eye flashed on his son's grey and quaking face and flashed away again.

"Nice-looking kiddy," he said calmly. "Just the age to take us all for his dad."

"Yes," panted Ned, his moist hands gripping the arm of his chair.

"How many's she got?"

"Two, I believe."

"Boys?"

"Yes, both."

The father took a cigar leisurely from his case, cut it and began to smoke.

"I'd have liked a large family," he said quietly.

The son raised his eyes of a hunted hare.

"I know, father," he stuttered. "I'm afraid I've been a great dud—disappointment to you."

"Stop it!" grunted the other. "Or I'll go into the kitchen." He puffed away, lost in his reflections. "It was your mother," he went on. "She couldn't stand the racket. That sort can't. The English aristocracy breed in and in too much. That's why they always fail. No red blood in em." He added, after a pause, "You almost killed her; and you were only a five-pounder when you were born...."

Before he left Mr. Caspar did go into the kitchen alone.

"I'm going to give that woman half-a-sovereign," he explained. "She gave me a decent luncheon."

He went down the passage and knocked at the kitchen-door.

"Come in," said a voice.

He entered.

The woman faced him, formidable as a tigress guarding her cubs.

Her enemy eyed her with something more than kindness.

"I've seen one child," he said with the charm he could assume at will. "Where's tother?"

His manner disarmed her. Half-hidden behind a towel-horse was a cot. Anne Caspar stood aside while the big man bent over the sleeping child.

"Ern's all right," she said. "This'n's not much to talk on—as yet. I'd not have rared him only for Mr. Trupp."

"Mr. Trupp's a great man," said the other, and laid two sovereigns on the table.

"One for each of em," he explained.

The woman coloured faintly.

There was about her the beauty of a clear and frosty day.

"Thank-you," she said.

He held out his hand.

She took it, and he would not let it go, those eyes of his, in which light and darkness, cruelty and kindness, chased each other, engaging hers.

"Good-bye," he said. "I don't know what your name is—Look after him," He jerked his head towards the door. "He needs it."

The woman dropped her eyes, the lovely colour deepening in her cheeks.

"I'll try," she said, her natural surliness dashed with ungracious graciousness.

In the passage he put on his coat.

Edward came out to him.

"Good-bye, Ned," he said. "Good luck," and put his hand almost affectionately on his son's shoulder. "I'm going down to look in on Trupp and curse him from the Board for leaving the Whitechapel. Damn tomfoolery. He'd a career before him, that man."

When he left his son to carry out his threat, Mr. Caspar struck into the steep main street of Old Town, which preserved still the somewhat stagnant atmosphere of a country village. On the left the parish church, square-towered, massive, grey, stood on a slight eminence over a green hollow, called still the Moot, in which was a pond that may have been the source of the original bourne. Beneath the church the old Star inn hung its sign-board across the way. Here Borough Lane crossed the street, running steeply down between the church and the inn and as steeply up under noble beech-trees along the garden-wall of the Queen Anne mansion which must clearly be the Manor-house.

The brass-plate on the door confirmed the visitor's conjecture.

Yes; Mr. Trupp was in.

The house was beautiful within as it was plain and solid outside. In the hall wainscoted, spacious, and with shining oaken floors, a grandfather's clock swung its pendulum rhythmically.

The room into which Mr. Caspar was shown had a wide bow-window looking out over gracious lawns and laburnum-trees in blossom to the elms in Saffrons Croft.

Mr. Trupp entered. He was a slight man with a moustache, who tilted his shrewd, rather sharp face to inspect his visitor through pince-nez.

"Well, Mr. Caspar," he growled genially.

"Ah, you runagate!" scolded the other. "What d'you mean by it?"

The doctor nodded at the window.

A beautiful young woman with chestnut hair, bare to the sun, was walking with extreme deliberation across the lawn, leaning on the arm of a nurse.

"That's one reason," he said.

The other gazed.

"Yes; you've given her the right setting," he remarked at last in a strangely quiet voice, touched with melancholy.

A greyhound emerged from a shrubbery and crossed the lawn after the two women at a stealthy trot.

"That's another," said Mr. Trupp.

"Sport!" cried the other. "Bah!—and you might have been a great man!—a credit to the Whitechapel. What's the next?"

"Professional," grunted the Doctor.

"Third and last of course," retorted the other. "That's you English all over. You don't know what work is. Still, Old Town for your wife and New Town for your practice—may be something in it after all."

The surgeon opened the window.

"Come and be introduced," he said, and led the way across the lawn. "She'd like to meet you."

Mrs. Trupp showed herself delightfully shy in her large and royal way. Mr. Caspar was Mr. Caspar; and the fair creature knew the secret of Mr. Caspar's son. She was indeed the only woman in Beachbourne who knew it, and that not because Mr. Trupp had told her, but because she was the only woman in whom Anne Caspar had confided,—as had, in fact, Edward too. Her meeting therefore with Mr. Caspar senior was full of dramatic possibilities. Her innocent soul thrilled with pleasurable alarm at the perilous character of the situation. She felt a little guilty and wholly defensive; and her transparent face betrayed every emotion as a pool reflects a cloud.

Mr. Caspar watched her as she worked, with admiration and amusement.

"You've come down to see your son, I expect," she said in her charming leisured voice.

"I have," he answered brusquely, the light flashing in his eyes. "He seems snug enough. Not bad lodgings."

"As lodgings go," said Mrs. Trupp, delicately, bending over her work as her colour came and went.

"That's a queer creature," continued Mr. Caspar.

"Who?"

"The woman my son's lodging with."

Mrs. Caspar held up her work to inspect it.

"She is a little funny in her manner," she replied, and began to pride herself on her skill in evading the enemy without telling a downright lie. "She's a fine cook, I believe."

"She's a fine woman," said Mr. Caspar.

The beautiful creature tossed her head as though he was suggesting something improper, which no doubt he was.

Mr. Caspar chuckled without shame or mercy; but as he walked back to the house his mood changed.

"Well," he said gravely, "I congratulate you, Trupp. Children may be the greatest blessing in a man's life."

Back in the consulting-room he was still very quiet. All the teasing laughter was gone from him. The mischievous boy, the trampling conqueror, had disappeared. Their place had been taken by a sad and even pathetic man.

"What is it?" asked Mr. Trupp, as his visitor sank back in the big chair.

"I'm sick as herrings," replied the other.

"Labour troubles?"

The big man, with his black hair, pale face and swarthy eyes, shook his head.

"I wish it was." He put his hand to his heart. "I've got notice to quit. Rivers gives me eighteen months at most. Damn nuisance." He stared out of the window at the two women under the elm. "I don't feel like dying. And there was so much to do."

"Let's see," said the Doctor.

He applied the stethoscope, and then replaced it in his pocket without comment. It was clear from the negative expression of his face that he agreed with Sir Audrey Rivers' judgment.

Mr. Caspar, intuitive as his friend, asked no questions.

"That's it," said he. "Machine wearing out. I've rattled her about too much, I suppose. Well, a man must live—my sort of man at least. I could never be content to rust. There's nothing to be done. It's just good-bye and no au revoir this time. That's why I came down. I wanted to see the boy before I pushed off." He turned suddenly. "How's he getting on?"

Mr. Trupp shrugged his shoulders.

"No improvement?" asked the other.

"I wouldn't say that. He's put the brake on a bit of late."

"Or had it put on for him," muttered Mr. Caspar.

He mused for some time.

"I'd have taken a peerage but for him," he said at last. "I can't see Ned as a hereditary legislator."

"Oh, I don't know," mumbled Mr. Trupp. He was an aggressive radical of the then active school of Dilke and Chamberlain. "I think he'd do very well in the House of Lords."

The young man had touched the springs of laughter in the other's heart. Hans Caspar's immense vitality asserted itself again. He resumed himself with a shout, sweeping the clouds boisterously away.

"Ned's a true Beauregard," he said. "Just his mother over again. So charming and so ineffectual! Always some weak strain in an hereditary aristocracy."

"Must be," muttered Mr. Trupp. "They're never weeded out. They're above the laws of Nature. Case of Survival of the Unfittest—protected by Law and living on you and me to whom they dictate the Law. Albino bunnies in a gilded hutch with a policeman watching over em!"

"Good!" cried Mr. Caspar. "Albino bunnies is good. It took my albino in the way of religious orgies. I prefer Ned's trouble of the two. Less humbug about it." He got up and began restlessly to pace the room. "There's nothing like religion to eat a man's soul away, Trupp—to say nothing of a woman's. You don't let your wife go to church, I understand. Well, you're a shrewd fellow. That way lies the bottomless pit. Mine took to it—it was in her blood, mind you—when I was away in the River Plate driving the Trans-Argentine Railway from the Atlantic to the Pacific. When I came back—good Lord! Priests to luncheon, Bishops to dinner, Deaconesses to tea. Missionary meetings in the drawing-room, altars in the alcove, parasites everywhere. In her last illness she would have a religeuse to see to her instead of one of our nurses from the Whitechapel. Of course she died. Serve her right, too, say I." He paused. "With Ned it was just touch and go which way it would take him. I thought at one time his mother's trouble'd got him, but in the end it was..." He jiggled his elbow.

"He's not a bad sort," muttered Mr. Trupp.

Hans Caspar took the other by the lapel of his coat.

"But that's just what makes me so mad, man!" he cried. "If he'd been vicious I could have kicked his back-side with joy. But you couldn't kick Ned. You can't kick a pathetic vacuum." He added with a swagger: "No man can accuse Hans Caspar of being afraid to use the jack-boot. You don't kick bottoms half enough in England."

"There's plenty of kicking bottoms," answered the other. "The trouble is that the men who kick bottoms never get their own kicked. If every man who kicked knew for certain that he would automatically be kicked in his turn, we might get on a bit."

Hans Caspar chuckled.

"Your idea of Utopia," he said. "Everybody standing round in a circle, with his hands on the shoulders of the man in front, hacking him. I like it."

"I believe," chanted Mr. Trupp, "in the Big Stick. That's my creed. But I want it applied by everybody to everybody—not by the strong to the weak as we do in this country, and you do in yours."

"My firm belief you're this new-fangled creature—a Socialist," said Hans Caspar.

"What if I am!" grunted the other. In fact, in London he had attended meetings of the recently born Fabian Society, and had heard William Morris preach on Sunday evenings in the stables of Kelmscott House. The young surgeon had found himself in general sympathy with the views expounded, but like many another man could not tolerate the personalities of the expounders of the new creed. "Apart from Morris, they're such prigs," he would say, "and so blatant about it. Always thrusting their alleged intellectual superiority down your throat. And after all, they're only advocating what every sensible man must advocate—the application of the method of Science to the problems of Government."

Mr. Caspar had gone to the window and was staring out.

"How long'll that boy of mine last the pace he's going?" he asked, subdued again.

"He might last thirty years yet," the other answered.

Hans Caspar turned round.

"With that woman to run him, you mean?"

"What woman's that?"

"His wife."

It was Mr. Trupp's turn to look away.

"She's the sort for him," he mumbled warily.

The other broke in with vehement enthusiasm.

"The sort for him!—why, if I'd married a woman like that—with a back-bone like steel, and the jaws of a rat-trap—I'd have been a Napoleon."

Mr. Trupp's face was still averted. Its naturally shrewd expression had for the moment a satirical touch.

"You think he's a lucky fellow to get her?" said the other.

Mr. Trupp's silence was eloquent enough.

"Ah," continued Hans Caspar knowingly. "I see. You think she got him. I dare say. She's the sort of woman who'd get anything she wanted. And he's the kind of man who'd be got by the first woman who wanted him. I took the measure of her at first sight. Fact I was just going to offer her the job of manageress of my canteen at rail-head—when I found out. She'd make the navvies sit up, I'll swear."

"Her hands are pretty full as it is," commented Mr. Trupp.

The other nodded.

"I expect so," he said. "Ned alone's one woman's job. And the two children." He put his hand on the surgeon's arm. "That eldest boy, Trupp!"

"What about him?"

"He's his grandmother over again. Watch him!"

A bell in the street clanged.

"What's that?" he asked.

"Station-bus," said Mr. Trupp. "The driver strikes the coaching-bell over the Star as he passes."

"I must catch it."

The big man put on his coat and went out. At the door of the inn a two-horse bus was drawn up.

Mr. Caspar climbed up beside the driver.

The young surgeon closed the front-door and turned.

His wife stood framed in the garden-window against a background of green.

"Did he find out?" she asked anxiously.

"My dear," her husband answered, "he did."

The tender creature's face fell.

"Oh, the poor Caspars!" she cried.

Sir Audrey Rivers' diagnosis proved correct. Just a year after his visit to Beachbourne Mr. Caspar died.

His will caused malicious merriment to those who knew "Unser Hans," as he was called in Society.

He left the bulk of his vast fortune in trust for the Whitechapel Hospital—with one proviso: that no clergyman was to act as a trustee. For the rest he bequeathed £300 a year for life, free of Income Tax, to his daughter-in-law, Mrs. Edward Caspar; and should she pre-decease her husband, the sum was to be continued to his son.

"Sound fellow that," said Mr. Trupp, when he heard. "Old Man Caspar to the end."

"It's rather hard on our Mr. Caspar," remarked his wife, who had known Edward Caspar in London before either had married.

"My dear," replied the surgeon, with the slight sententiousness peculiar to him, "the only way to help that sort of son is to be hard on him."

"I hope you'll never help my Joe like that," cried the beautiful woman warmly.

Mr. Trupp loved to tease his wife.

"If your Joe goes that way I will," he grinned—"and worse. So mind your eye!"

Another woman who was not amused by Hans Caspar's will was the woman who benefited by it.

Anne Caspar had the qualities of her kind. If she was hard, she was passionately loyal and genuinely devoted to her Ned. When she had told Mr. Trupp that her marriage had been a love-match she had but spoken the truth as regards her part in it. Therefore on the morning she opened the letter from the lawyers announcing that she had come by miracle into what was for the daughter of the Ealing tobacconist a fortune, she felt a slight had been put upon her husband and was perturbed accordingly.

With pensive face she went into the study, wearing the long blue over-all in which Edward Caspar had first seen her.

Her husband stood in his shirt-sleeves, pipe in mouth, a loose, round-shouldered figure, splashing away with vague enthusiasm at a canvas in the sunny bow-window.

She realized in a moment that she had caught him in one of his rare uplifted moods.

"Ned," she said.

"What-ho, my Annie!"

"Your father's left us £300 a year."

He chuckled as he painted, one eye on the gleaming mystery of the Downs.

"Been opening my letters, you burglar?"

"The letter's to me."

This time he turned, saw her face, and steadied.

She offered him the envelope.

He glanced at the address.

"Yes, it's to you all right. Funny they didn't write to me."

"Won't you read it, Ned?" she said gently.

He skimmed the contents and winced.

"That's all right, Anne," he said, handing it back to her, and patting her hand. "The old man's been as good as his word—and better, by the amount of Income Tax."

"Such a way to do it and all," said Anne censoriously.

He pinched her arm.

"Perhaps it's for the best," he said. "And anyway, it doesn't much matter." If Edward Caspar was by no means sure of himself, he was sure beyond question of the woman life had given him.

She lifted her face to his, and it was beautiful.

"Ned," she said; and he kissed her.

The Domesday Book tells us that King Edward the Confessor held the Manor of Burne, and gave the endowment of the Church of St. Michael to the Abbey of Fecamp, along with the Lordships of Steyning and Rye and Winchelsea and other jewels from the crown of Sussex; as all who have read Mr. Dudgeon's scholarly history of Beachbourne will recall.

Harold cancelled the grant, with the result, so legend has it, that William the Norman landed at Pevensey just across the way to enforce restitution. In those days the parish of Burne covered like a blanket the western promontory of the great Bay. At each of the four corners of the blanket, holding it down as it were, was a rude hamlet. On the bourne itself a few hovels clustered round the wooden church upon the Kneb; in Coombe-in-the-Cliff, carved out of the flank of Beau-nez, was Holy Well, haunted by pilgrims from the Continent; on the sea-front there was the Wish, beneath which of old a Roman dock had been; and further east was Sea-gate with its fishing-station and the earth-work which guarded the entrance to the Bay whose waters swept inland over what are now the Levels to Ratton and Horsey and the borders of Hailsham.

In the reign of Henry II the Norman church, much as we know it to-day, succeeded the crazy wooden building in which our Saxon forefathers heard the Word of the Promise first brought to Sussex by Bishop Wilfrith, who starting from the North, dared the perils of the Forest, and somehow fought his way through brake and marsh and thicket, among wild beasts and wilder men, to the ancient Roman settlement at Chichester; thence to spread the news all along the high bleak coast-line on which at river-mouths and lagoon-like estuaries the Saxon adventurers had gained a footing.

Till the nineteenth century the parish that lay scattered thus between the Downs, the marshes, and the sea, changed but little, experiencing the ordinary vicissitudes of an English village. Bishops made their visitations. Rectors lived and died. Outlaws sought sanctuary at the altar of the church above the Moot, which was still the centre of the life of the little pastoral community. In the last half of the fourteenth century the massive tower was added which dominated the village as it dominates the town to-day; built perhaps as a thank-offering for the passing of the Black Death, which slew half the population, reduced the monks at Michelham to five, and, with indiscriminating zeal, laid a clammy hand on the Abbot of Battle and Prior of St. Pancras, Lewes; while giving rise to a wave of industrial unrest which a few years later sent the rebellious men of Sussex Londonwards behind the ragged banner of Jack Cade.

In 1534 the Proclamation repudiating the Pope was read from the pulpit of the church upon the Kneb; and ten years later the first outburst of Puritanism stripped the consecrated building of many shrines, pictures, ornaments, as our historian has recently reminded us.

The village thrilled to the threat of the Spanish Armada, and, what is more, prepared to meet it; the inhabitants having—time out of memory of man, we are told—a reputation, the outcome of experience and necessity, for dealing with the landings of forraine enemies.

During the Parliamentary troubles the Squire of Beachbourne was of course a stout-hearted Royalist; and his friend the Rector was brought up before the authorities on a charge of "malignancy." Found guilty, he was removed from office; whereupon, as his brass quaintly reminds us, the gallant gentleman mori maluit—preferred to die. And it is on record that the parish was only saved from the ravages of Civil War by the abominable condition of the roads of East Sussex. Perhaps the same factor told against the prosperity of the place. For, by the middle of the eighteenth century, Beachbourne, as it was now called, had dwindled in population to a few hundred souls. Later in the same century, about the time Newhaven was born, it began to blossom out as a health resort. A celebrity or two discovered its remote charm. A peer succeeded the Squire at the big house. Behind the Wish a row of sea-houses sprang into being on the front. But Dr. Russell of Lewes and the Prince Regent, in turning the fishing-village of Brightelmstone into fashionable Brighton, ruined for the moment its rival under Beau-nez. Beachbourne had to wait its turn until the iron horse, running on an iron road, across country that not long since had been washed by tides, overcame with astounding ease the difficulties that teams of snorting oxen up to the hocks in mud had found insuperable.

Then, and only then, the four corners of the parish came together apace. The old bourne disappeared, the source of it in the Moot under the church-crowned Kneb now no more than a stagnant pond. And by the time of our story a city of tens of thousands of inhabitants had risen where men, still middle-aged, could recall meadows that swept down to the sea, the voice of the corn-crake harsh everywhere as they sauntered down Water Lane of evenings after church, and the last fight of the "gentlemen" and the Revenue Officers that took place on a desolate strip of shore to the sound of calling sea-birds, on the site of what is now the Cecil Hotel.

Next time Mr. Trupp called at 60 Rectory Walk, he marked that the familiar chocolate notice in the upper window had gone.

He chaffed Mrs. Caspar in his grim way.

"No more rooms to let, I see," he said.

"No," the woman answered. "No more lies to have to tell just at present."

She was in one of her tartest moods; and when he congratulated her on being through her troubles, she answered,

"Some of em. Plenty more to follow. There'll be enough money for Ned and me and the boys. That's one thing."

"And a big thing too," said Mr. Trupp.

"The biggest," admitted the woman surlily. "Speaking worldly-wise, I don't say nay to that."

After the birth of her second son, Mr. Trupp had told her that she would have no more children and she was glad: for her hands were going to be full enough throughout her life; so much the shrewd woman saw clearly. There was her husband; and there was her eldest son, Ernie, who was his father over again.

He had his father's face, his father's charm, his father's soft and generous heart; and, unless she was mistaken, other qualities of his father that were by no means so desirable. And the curious thing was that the characteristics which in her husband Anne Caspar secretly admired, only exasperated her in Ernie.

Alf, the second son, whatever his faults, certainly did not trace them to his dad. He was as much his mother's child as Ernie was his father's. And whether for that reason or because for years she had to wrestle for his miserable little life with the Angel of Death, his mother loved him with the fierce, protecting passion of an animal.

"Nobody but his mother could have saved him," Mr. Trupp told his wife.

While Mrs. Caspar said to the same lady,

"But for Mr. Trupp he wouldn't be here."

A proud woman, Mrs. Caspar was also a very lonely one. Her genuine pride in her rather ramshackle husband—his birth, his breeding, his obvious air of a gentleman—which evinced itself in her almost passionate determination that he should dress himself "as such," prevented her from associating with her own class; and the women of her husband's class would not associate with her. Mrs. Trupp, the kindest of souls, was the solitary exception. But the two women were antipathetic. The doctor's wife, who possessed in full measure the noble toleration that marks the best of her kind, was forced to admit to her conscience, that she could not bring herself to like Mrs. Caspar. The large and beautiful nature of the former, brought to fruition in the sunshine and shelter of a cultivated home, could not understand the harsh combativeness of the daughter of the small tobacconist, who had fought from childhood for the right to live.

"She's like a wolf," Mrs. Trupp told her husband. "Even with her children."

"My dear," said the wise Doctor, "she's had to snap to survive. You haven't. Others have done your snapping for you."

"She needn't snap and snarl at that dear, gentle husband of hers," retorted Mrs. Trupp.

"If she didn't," replied her husband drily, "she'd be a widow in a week."

"Anyway she might be kind to that eldest boy," continued Mrs. Trupp, who at Edward Caspar's request had stood sponsor to Ernie. "He's beautiful, and such breeding. A true Beauregard."

"What d'you make of the baby?" asked her husband with sudden interest.

"Why, he's like a little rat," answered Mrs. Trupp. "He's the only baby I've ever seen I didn't want to handle."

"Yet there's something in him," replied the other thoughtfully. "He wouldn't have lived else. A touch of Old Man Caspar about that child somewhere. He'll bite all right if he lives to be a man."

And to the Doctor's shrewd and seeing eye it was clear from the start that Alfred meant to live to be a man. Somewhere in the depths of his wretched little body there glowed a spark that all the threats and frosts of a hostile Nature failed to extinguish. On that spark his mother blew with a tenacity surpassing words; Mr. Trupp blew in his wise way, working the bellows of Science with the easy skill of the master-workman; little Ernie, most loving of children, blew too. Even Edward Caspar leaned over the cot in his quilted dressing gown and said,

"He's coming on."

But even as he leant, the sensitive fellow knew that there was not and could never be any bond between him and his youngest born. His heart was with Ernie. And the way his mother rebuffed the elder lad, only endeared him the more to his father.

The two lads grew: Ernie strong in body, loving in heart, lacking in will; Alf ardent of spirit, ruthless as a stoat upon the trail, and rickety as an old doll.

There was a first-rate elementary school in Old Town to which the two boys went when the time came. The headmaster, Mr. Pigott, was also manager of the chapel in the Moot which Mrs. Caspar attended regularly.

The hard woman was religious in the common Puritan way, so dear to the English lower-middle-class of her generation. Her Chapel and her God were both a great deal to the austere woman, especially the former. She had a stern and narrow moral code of her own which she mistook for love of Christ. From that code she never departed herself, and punished to the utmost of her power all those who did depart from it.

In a chapel of her own denomination she had insisted on being married, in spite of the fact that she risked by her obstinacy losing the only man she had ever loved.

Ned Caspar, for his part, took his religion, as most of us do, from his mother. He was High Church at a time when to be so was far less fashionable than it is at present. He called himself a Catholic, and spoke always of the Mass in a way that shocked his fellow-churchmen who were in those days still content to speak of themselves as Protestants and the sacramental act as Holy Communion. And after marriage he maintained his position with a far greater tenacity than most would have expected of the soft-willed man. Indeed, it was the one point on which, aided by his mother's memory, he stood up to his wife for long.

"I'll wear you down yet, my son," Anne told him grimly. "May as well come off the perch now as later."

In this one matter her taunts served only, so it seemed, to strengthen her husband's resistance.

He went white, shook, perspired, and continued to attend High Mass at St. Michael's, in spite of his growing distaste for the man who administered it—his neighbour, Prebendary Willcocks, across the road.

A far wiser woman than she seemed, Mrs. Caspar recognized her mistake, desisted from her original line of attack, and let her husband go his own way for a time without protest—as the cat permits the mouse a little liberty.

When she began to take the children to chapel with her, she said—and Anne Caspar could be beautiful upon occasion—

"Ned, I wish you'd come along with me and the boys sometimes. I do feel it so that we never worship in common."

That was the beginning of the end of his resistance.

He became an occasional attendant at the chapel, if he could never bring his aesthetic spirit, seeking everywhere for colour, harmony and form, to become a professed member of the rather dreary little community.

And later, for quite other reasons, he dropped St. Michael's entirely.

But for twenty years after he had ceased to call himself a member of the Church of England, often of Sunday afternoons in the spring and summer he would take the train to London Bridge, and wander East on the top of a dawdling bus, to find himself, about the time most churches close their doors, outside St. Jude's in Commercial Street, the "chuckers in" already busy at their work among the street-roughs and fighting factory girls. Edward Caspar was not a "chucker-in" himself; but when the quiet doorkeeper of the House of the Lord opened it at 8.30 he was of the first to enter the lighted church, the side-aisles of which were darkened that tramp and prostitute might sit there unnoticed and unashamed. And in that motley assembly of hooligans from the East End, of respectable artisans from streets drab as their inmates, of intellectuals from Toynbee Hall, and occasional visitors from the West End, he would join in that irregular and beautiful Hour of Worship, of song, silent meditation, solos on organ or violin, extempore prayer, readings from Mazzini, Maurice, Ruskin, and Carlyle, that made him and others dream of that Society of the Redeemed which in days to come should gather thus, without priest or ceremonial, simply to rejoice together in the blessing of a common life and universal Father.

Edward Caspar went occasionally to chapel in order to gratify his wife. He ceased attending church because his always growing spirit, intensely modern and aspiring in spite of its inherent weakness, no longer found satisfaction in the ornate ritual, the quaint mediæval formulæ, the iterations and reiterations of the sacerdotalism which had held his mother in its grip.

As a student of comparative religion his intellect was still interested in forms which his seeking mind had long rejected as empty, ludicrous, or inadequate.

His reading for his book, his experience of life, and most of all an inner urge, led him in time to look for the spiritual comfort that was his most vital need outside the walls of the consecrated prison in which he had been bred.

Quia fecisti nos ad Te cor nostrum inquietum est donec requiscat in Te was the motto that hung above his writing-desk. And his restless heart found increasingly its peace sometimes in music, sometimes amid the hum of men and women in the crowded streets of the East End of the town, and most often in quiet communion with Nature on the Downs or beside the sea in some gap far from the haunts of men.

He would ramble the lonely hills by the hour, lost in thought, Ernie skirmishing about him.

Sometimes Mr. Trupp, riding with his little daughter up there between the sky and sea, would meet the couple.

"Like a bear and a terrier, Bess," he would smile.

Then in some secluded valley, father and son would lie down in the "loo" of the hill, as Ernie called it.

Resting there with contented spirits amid the gorse, they would watch the gulls, white-winged and desolately crying over the plough, while the larks purred above them.

These were the best moments of Ernie's childhood, never to pass from him in the tumult and battle of later life. A child of the earth, even his tongue, touched with the soft slur of Sussex caught from school-mates, betrayed him for a countryman. He loved the feel of the turf solid beneath him; he loved the sound of the gorse-pods snapping in the sun; he loved the thump of the sea crashing on the beach far below; and most of all he loved the larks pouring comfort into the cistern of his mind until it too seemed to brim with the music of praise.

"Loving, idn't they?" he would say in his sweet little voice, his hands behind his head, his eyes on a speck of song thrilling in the blue.

"That's it, Boy-lad," his father's answer would come from beneath the cavern of his hat; and Edward Caspar forthwith would repeat, in a voice that seemed to co-ordinate the harmonies of earth and sky and sea, Wordsworth's Lines above Tintern Abbey:

            ... That serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,—
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:

Alf never came on these excursions. The bent of the two brothers was indeed entirely different. If they left the house together, as often as not they parted at the garden-gate. Ern turned his face towards the green hills that blocked the end of the road, Alf turned his back on them.

"Nothin doin there," he would say with a knowing wink. He hated walking, and he feared the loneliness of the hills. His heart was in the East End of the growing town. Down there, beyond the gas-works, at the edge of the Levels, where the trams clanged continually, where you heard strange tongues, and saw new types of faces, Alf found himself. The little urchin, who seemed all eyes in a hideous square head, would wander by the hour in Sea-gate, among the booths and barrows, drinking in the life about him, and return home at night tired but contented.

In bed the two boys would compare their experiences.

"What did you see?" Ern would ask.

"Everythink," Alf would answer. "Folks and a fight and all."

"I see something, too," said Ernie, deliberate alike of speech and mind.

"What then?" asked Alf, scornfully.

"I see angels," Ernie answered. "Dad see em too."

But Alf only sniggered.

At that time Old Town hung, as it were, between the Past and the Future. It had not shaken off the one, and yet could not resist the other. Beneath it was New Town, a growing industrial city, absorbing workers of every kind from every quarter; stretching back from the sea to Rodmill and overrunning the marshes at an incredible speed; with the slums, the Sunday agitators, the Salvationists and reformers, the rumble of discontent, that mark the cities of our day. Beyond it lay the immemorial countryside with shepherds on the hills, oxen ploughing in the valleys, villages clustered about the village-green, the squire, the public-house, the parish-church as in the days of Elizabeth. Old Town still slept upon its hill about the parish-church, but the murmur of the ungainly offspring at its feet disturbed slumbers that had endured for centuries. In its steep streets you might hear the undulating Sussex tongue, little changed from Saxon times, clashing in vain conflict with the aggressive cockney phrase and accent which is conquering the British Isles as surely, if as slowly, as did the English of the men of the Elbe in by-gone days.

Ernie was of the older life; Alf of the new.

Their very speech betrayed them: for the elder boy's tongue was touched with the slow, cawing music of the shepherds and labourers with whom he loved to consort, while Alf's was the speech of a city rat, sharp, incisive, twanging.

In the holiday Ern worked on the hill in the harvest, and was known to all the men and most of the animals at the Moot Farm, just across the Lewes Road. Once, in the early spring, he passed the night out in Shadow Coombe, and came home fearfully just before school.

His mother was shaking the mat at the front-door.

"Where you been then?" she asked ferociously.

"With the shepherd in his hut," answered Ernie. "Dis lambin time. His boy's run'd away."

The lad's manifest truthfulness disarmed the angry woman.

Alf peeped round his mother's skirts.

"Did he give you anythink?" he asked.

"I didn't ask him for nohun," Ern answered, aggrieved.

Alf sneered.

"Fat 'ead!" he cried. "Aynt arf soft, Ern aynt!"

Their father, dressing at the upper window, heard the conversation and agonized. Tolerant as was Edward Caspar of grammatical solecisms, his ear, sensitive as Lady Blanche's, writhed at the mangling of vowels by his second son. His wife, who came from the Bucks border of the great city on the Thames, had indeed the Cockney phrase but not the offending accent.

When he came downstairs, in a moment of despair, he poured his troubles into Anne's unsympathetic ear.

"What a way to talk!" he groaned.

"I don't see it matters," his wife answered grimly. "They aren't going to Harrow and Trinity."

The big man winced. It was a real grief to him that his sons were not to have in life the advantages that he believed himself to have been given.

"You needn't throw that up at me," he grumbled into his brown beard.

She put her hand on his shoulder.

Her husband was the only creature in the world to whom Anne Caspar sometimes demonstrated affection.

"And a good job, too, I says," she observed. "They got to work." Words that gave unconscious witness to the estimate she and her class held of their rulers and their education.

Instead then of going to the Preparatory-school, the Public-school, and the University in which their father had sought to learn the art of useful citizenship, the two lads attended on week-days the Board-school in the hollow between the church and Rodmill.

New amid much that was old, it reared its gaunt red head above a crowd of workmen's cottages which stood on ground still called the Moot, where of old, under the Kneb, beside the bourne, the Saxon folk from hill and wold and marshy level gathered about the Moot-tree to discuss affairs, deal justly between man and man and proclaim the common will.

Mr. Pigott, a short, shrewd, bearded man, with a merry grey eye, swift to wrath, was the headmaster as he was manager of the chapel. Thoroughly efficient in a day when the Gospel of Efficiency had been little preached, he managed chapel and school admirably.

The boys attended both.

Alf was always at the head of his class, Ern never anywhere in particular.

As Mr. Pigott told the boys' mother, Ern had plenty of brains, but he didn't care to use them.

"He's a little gentleman though—like his father," ended the schoolmaster.

Mr. Pigott was on the whole less of a snob than most of us. As an honest radical he scorned rank, perhaps a little ostentatiously; while money was very little to him. But for the mysterious quality of breeding he had the respect the roughest of us confess in the presence of something finer than ourselves. And on the rare occasions in which Mr. Edward Caspar had been induced to deliver an address at the new Institute he would say to his teaching staff in awed voice—"There's English for you! Don't you wish you could talk like that...?"

Now his comparison of her son to her husband provoked Mrs. Caspar as it never failed to do.

"That's all very well if you can afford it," she commented acridly. "But Ern's got to make his own way in the world."

"He'll do," said Mr. Pigott. "He won't be forgotten, you'll see. He's a good lad, and that's something even in these days."

And if Ernie was not a success in the schoolroom, in the playground he excelled. Like his father in being universally popular, he was unlike him in his marked athletic capacity.

True, he was always in trouble for slacking with the masters, who none the less were fond of him; while Alf, the most assiduous of youths, was disliked by everybody and gloried in it. He won all the gilt-edged prizes, while Ern took the canings.

Alf reported his brother's misdoings gleefully at home.

"Ern got it again," he crowed jubilantly one evening. "They fairly sliced him, didn't they, Ern?"

His recollections of the scene were so spicy that—for once—he was dreadfully affectionate to the brother who had given him such prurient pleasure.

"Ern in trouble of course!" cried the mother angrily. "You needn't tell me! A nice credit to his home and all! I'm ashamed to look Mr. Pigott in the face come Sunday!'

"Now then, mother!" grumbled Mr. Caspar. "Let the boy alone!"

"Yes, you're always for him!" flared Mrs. Caspar, buttering the bread. "Setting him against his mother! But for you he'd be all right."

Alf sat like a little wizened devil at the end of the table in his high chair, his eyes twinkling malignantly over his bib, enjoying the fun.

"It's him and Ern against you and me, mum, ayn't it?" he cried, shuffling on his seat.

Whether it was his son's accent or a sense of the tragic truth underlying his child's words, that affected him, Mr. Caspar rose and shuffled out of the kitchen into the study, which was looked on in the family as dad's sanctuary.

The scene had taken place in the kitchen at tea, which was the one meal the family shared. Breakfast, dinner, supper, Edward Caspar had by himself in the little back room looking out on the fig-tree; and Mrs. Caspar waited on him.

That was by her desire, not his: for from the start of their married life Anne had determined that, so far as in her lay, her husband should have everything just as he was accustomed to. Thus from earliest infancy the children had been taught by their mother to understand that the two sitting-rooms were sacred to dad, and never to be entered except by permission. Their place was the kitchen. She herself set the example by always knocking on the door of either room before entering.

And the atmosphere of these two rooms was radically different from that of the rest of the house. Anne knew it and rejoiced. Everywhere else the tobacconist's daughter reigned obviously supreme. These rooms were the habitat of a scholar and a gentleman. The little back-room, indeed, was remarkable for little but the solidity of its few articles of furniture, and the old silver salver with the crest, reposing on the mahogany side-board. But the front sitting-room, with the bow-window looking out on to Beech-hangar and the long spur of the Downs that hid Beau-nez from view, was known in the family as the study, and looked what it was called.

The room, flooded with sunshine, was Mrs. Caspar's secret pride. She knew very well that there was nothing quite like it in Beachbourne, Old or New, and preserved it jealously. She did not understand it, much preferring her own kitchen, but she recognized that it stamped her husband for what he was, admired its atmosphere of distinction, and loved showing it to her rare visitors. On these occasions she stood herself in the passage, one arm of steel barring the door, like a priest showing the sanctuary to one without the pale. And it gave her malicious pleasure when Canon Willcocks, from the Rectory, opposite, calling one day, showed surprise, not untinged with jealousy, at what he was permitted to see. The Canon clearly thought it unseemly that Lazarus living at the Rectory gate should boast a room like that. And he was seriously annoyed when Anne, pointing to the Cavalier upon the wall, referred to the first Lord Ravensrood as "my children's ancestor."

On the evening of the squabble in the kitchen, Ernie joined his father in the study after tea.

As Alf was fond of remarking, "Ern's welcome there if no one else ayn't."

Edward Caspar was sitting by the fire as usual, brooding over the meerschaum he was colouring. His manuscript lay where it usually lay on the chair at his side, and a critical eye would have noted that it was little thicker than when Mr. Trupp had first seen it some years before.

"Ain't you well then, dad?" asked the boy in his beautiful little treble.

"I'm all right, Boy-lad," the other answered. "Mother didn't touch you, did she?"

There was something reassuring always about Ernie's manner with his father, as of a woman dealing with a sick child.

"No," he replied. "She said I was to come to you."

"Why were you caned at school?" asked the father, after a pause.

The boy's eyes were down, and he scraped the floor with one foot.

"Fighting," he said at last reluctantly. "Where it were, Alf sauce Aaron Huggett in de playground, and Aaron twist Alf's arm. Allowed he'd had more'n enough of Alf's lip. And he wouldn't leggo. So I paint his nose for him. And it bled."

Edward Caspar puffed.

"Why don't you let Alfred fight his own battles?"

Steadfast to the tradition of his own class in this matter if in no other, he revolted against the common abbreviation of his younger son's name.

"Alf fight!" cried Ernie with rare scorn. "He couldn't fight no-hows. D'isn't in him. He'd just break."

"Then why does he sauce em?"

Ernie resumed his foot scraping.

"That's what I says to him," he admitted in his slow ca-a-ing speech. "Only where it seems he ca'an't keep his tongue tidy. Seems he ca'an't elp issalf like. Then he gets into trouble. Then I avs to fight for him."

"And if you don't fight for him no one else will?" said his father.

"No," replied Ernie with the delightful reluctance of innocence and youth. "See no one do'osn't like Alf—only issalf." He added as a slow after-thought, "And I be his brother like."

Edward Caspar held out a big hand.

Ern saw his father was pleased, he didn't know why; and he was glad.

In Ern's estimation there was no one in the world like dad—the kind, the comforter.

Once indeed in Sunday-school, some years before, when Mr. Pigott had been expatiating on the character of our Lord, the silence had been broken by the voice of a very little lad,

"My dad's like that."

In fact, as Ernie said, the two were brothers, and in some sort complementary.

Ern had to the full the chivalrous qualities of the Beauregards. He never forgot that he was Alf's elder brother, or that Alf was a poor little creature with a chest in which Mr. Trupp took an abnormal interest. He fought many battles, bore many blows for his young brother. Alf took it all as a matter of course, regarding himself as a little god whom Ernie was privileged to serve and suffer for. Ern accepted the other's constant suggestion of superiority without revolt, and took the second place with the lazy good-nature characteristic of him.

Ern indeed was nothing of a leader. In all the adventurous vicissitudes of boy-life the initiative lay with Alf, who planned the mischief; while Ern, obedient to his brother, for whose brains he had the profoundest admiration, carried it out and paid the penalty, as a rule uncomplainingly, at home and abroad.

Old Town was now creeping west along the foot of the Downs towards Lewes. On its outskirts and in the corn-fields where are to-day rows of red-brick villas, were still to be found flint cottages, long blue-roofed barns, and timbered farmsteads among elms. As little by little the town, with its border of allotment gardens, flooded along the New Road, sweeping up Rodmill and brimming over towards Ratton and the Decoy on the edge of the marshes, these buildings that dated from another age were gradually diverted from their pristine use to be the habitations of those who no longer drew their living from the earth.

Thus in the house which had once been the huntsman's lodge, beside the now abandoned kennels, lived Mr. Pigott—one foot in the country, as he said, one in the town.

Every morning he walked across the foot-path, past Moot Farm, to school. Mr. Pigott's house stood in a hollow coombe a long way back from the road. The gorse-clad sides of the Down rose steeply at the back of it. In front was an orchard in which a walnut-tree lorded it, conspicuous over the lesser trees.

It was towards the end of their school time, when Ern was nearly fourteen, that Alf planned a raid upon this tree, famous in the locality for its beauty and fruitfulness.

The adventure needed careful thinking out.

The approach to the house was along an unscreened path that led across the arable land. Between the path and the house was the orchard in which stood the tree with its coveted treasure.

The trouble was that Mrs. Pigott's window overlooked the orchard, and she was always in that window—so much Alf, in his many reconnaissances of the position, discovered.

Now it was well known in the school that Mrs. Pigott had but one eye, and that of glass, which accounted perhaps for its extraordinary powers of vision. And besides Mrs. Pigott with her one sharp eye, there was Mrs. Pigott's little dog with his many sharp teeth. There was also in the background Mr. Pigott, who, outside the chapel, was athletic and regrettably fierce.

Alf waited long for his opportunity, in terror lest the tree should be beaten before he had worked his will upon it, but his chance came at last.

One Saturday afternoon he and Ern were loitering in Church Street, marching along with the starts and stops, the semi-innocent and semi-surreptitious manner of boys waiting for Satan to enter into them and prompt them to definite action, when Alf dug his brother with a warning elbow.

Mrs. Pigott was staring with her glass eye into the ironmonger's opposite the church. On her arm was a basket and at her feet her dog. It was clear that she was doing her week-end shopping.

Alf, swift to seize his opportunity, set off up the hill, hot-foot, silent, with a bustle of arms and legs, his brow puckered as he concentrated ruthlessly upon his purpose.

Ern followed the fierce, insistent, little figure more leisurely.

"Steady on!" he called. "Where away then?"

"Walnut-tree," panted Alf. "Now's yer chance."

Ern, who knew from experience that the dirty and dangerous work would fall to his lot, lagged.

"Mr. Pigott's there," he grumbled.

"Now he ayn't then," cried Alf, spurring the laggard on. "He's gone over to Lewes for the Conference. Didn't you hear mother at breakfast?"

There had been in truth a split in the chapel. The Established Methodists were breaking away from the Foundation Methodists, and the Primitive Methodists were thinking of following suit. The little community was therefore a tumult of warring tongues.

Alf led up the hill, past the chalk-pit, along the side of the Downs, and dropped down on his objective from the rear. Coming to the fence that ran round the orchard, he peeped at the low house lying in the background under the green flank of the hill.

Ern followed reluctantly, as one drawn to his doom by a fate he cannot withstand.

He wanted the walnuts; he wanted to be brave; but he liked Mr. Pigott, and, usually obedient to his brother's suggestions, had qualms in this case.

"Go on then!" urged Alf. It was a favourite phrase of his. "There ayn't no one there."

"Come on yourself," answered Ern without enthusiasm.

"Now, I'll stay and watch the path for you against her," piped Alf.

But for once Ern was firm.

"I aren't a-gooin unless you cooms too," he said doggedly.

"What's the good of me, then?" scoffed Alf in his fierce and feverish way. "Can I climb the tree? Only wish I could. I'd show you. I suppose you'll be throwin that up at me next! My belief you're afraid."

But Ernie was not to be moved from the position which he had taken up. Just now and then Alf had remarked that his brother for all his softness became hard—adamant indeed—in a way that rather frightened Alf.

"I'll goo up the tree and shake em down to you," Ern said in his slow, musical voice. "You stand at the foot of her and gather em."

"Fine!" jeered Alf. "And when Mr. Pigott comes out you'll be up the tree safe as dysies, and I'll be on the floor for him to paste!"

"I thart you said he'd gone to Lewes," retorted Ern, unusually alert.

"So he has," replied Alf sourly. "Only I suppose he won't stay there for ever, will he?"

Ern, however, was proof against all the other's logic; and finally the two boys climbed the fence together.

The walnut was a majestic tree, with boughs that dropped almost to the ground, making a splendid pavilion of green.

Ern swarmed the tree. Alf stood at the foot, sheltered by the drooping branches. Thus he could watch the house, while nobody in the house could see anything of him but a pair of meagre black legs.

He was fairly safe and knew it, but even so his heart pattered, he bit his nails continually, and kept a furtive eye on the line of his retreat.

"Hurry!" he kept on calling.

Ern, up aloft, went to work like a man. He tossed the branches to and fro. The ripe walnuts came rattling down. Alf, underneath, gathered rich harvest. He filled his pockets, his cap, his handkerchief. Opening his shirt, he stuffed the brown treasure into his bosom and grew into a portly urchin who rattled when he moved.

"I got nigh a bushel!" he cried keenly. "Throw your coat down, and I'll fill the pockets!"

The little devil darted to and fro, tumbling spiderlike upon the falling riches, absorbed in accumulation. His heart and eyes burned. There was money in this—money. And money was already taking its appointed place in Alf's philosophy.

He would sell the nuts at so much a pound—some wholesale to a fruiterer he knew in the remote East End; some retail to his schoolfellows.

The quality and quantity of the loot so absorbed him that he forgot his fears. And when he glanced up through the screen of thick branches to see a pair of grey-stockinged legs, thick and formidable to a degree, advancing upon the tree with dreadful deliberation, his heart stopped.

The enemy was on them.

Alf emptied handkerchief, pockets, cap: he emptied himself by a swift ducking motion that sent the treasure heaped against his heart pouring forth with a rattle about his neck and head and ears.

Then he cast fearful eyes to the rear. It was thirty yards to the fence and beyond there was but the unscreened path without a scrap of cover, leading across the plough, past the Moot Farm and abandoned kennels to the New Road.

Alf saw at a glance that escape was impossible. Mr. Pigott, for all his forty years, could sprint.

Swift as a cornered rat, Alf made his decision.

He marched out from his shelter towards the approaching legs, a puny little creature with pale peaked face, and Ern's coat flung over his arm.

Mr. Pigott was advancing, very grim and grey, across the rough grass, his hands behind him, dragging something. He seemed in no hurry, and not in the least surprised to see Alf, whom he ignored.

"Please, sir," said Alf, perking his face up with an air of frankness, "there's a boy up your tree. Here's his coat."

Mr. Pigott walked slowly on, drawing behind him a sixty-foot hose, which issued like a white snake from the scullery window.

"I know," he said with suppressed quiet. "And I know who set him on to it. I can't beat you because you'd break if I touched you. But I'll take your brother's skin off him though he's twice the man you are, you dirty little cur!"

He brought the hose to bear on the brigand in the tree, and loosed the water-spout and the vials of his wrath together.

"Ah, you young scoundrel!" he roared, finding joy in explosive self-expression. "I'll teach you come monkeying after my nuts!"

Swish went the stream of water through the branches.

Ern hid as best he could on the leeward side of the trunk.

Mr. Pigott brought his artillery mercilessly to bear upon the boy's clasping hands. Ern, spluttering and sprawling, came down the tree with a rush and made a bolt for the fence.

Mr. Pigott, roaring jovially, played the stream full on him. It was a powerful gush, and floored the boy. The avenger knew no mercy and drenched his victim as he lay.

It was a sodden little figure who crept home disconsolately ten minutes later.

Alf had been back some time and had already told his tale, gibbering with excitement and fear.

Ern's mother, in a white fury, was awaiting the boy in the kitchen.

"I'll learn you disgrace me!" she cried. "Robbing your own chapel-manager's orchard—and then come home like a drownded rat!"

She set about the lad in good earnest.

Alf, perched upon the dresser to be out of the way, watched the fun, biting his nails.

"You mustn't hit her back then!" he screamed. "Your own mother!"

"I aren't hittin' her back then!" cried Ern, dogged, dazed, and warding off the blows as best he might. "I'm only defendin of mesalf."

The noise of the scuffle was considerable.

Outside in the passage was the sound of slippered feet. Then some one tried the door.

"It's only dad!" cried the devil on the dresser, white and with little black eyes that danced.

"What's up?" called an agitated voice from outside. "Hold on, mother! Give the boy a chance."

Some one rattled the door.

"Go about your business!" cried Mrs. Caspar. "There's a pair of you!"

Her anger exhausted and shame possessing her, she was going out into the yard to shelter herself in the little shed against the Workhouse wall, when Alf's sudden scream stayed her.

"Mum!—down't leave me!—he'll kill me!"

She turned to mark a white flare burning in the face of her elder son.

She had seen it before and had been afraid.

When Ern looked like that he ceased to be Ern: he became transfigured—yes, and terrible: like, she sometimes thought, the cavalier in the picture must have been in anger.

"Take them sopping duds off," she said quietly, "and then go up and put your Sundays on."

Half an hour later Ern, wearing dry clothes, entered the study.

He was sweet, smiling, and a thought abashed.

His father, on the other hand, evinced signs of terrible emotion.

His face was mottled, and he was shaking.

Wrapped in his dressing-gown, he stood before the fire, trying pitifully to preserve his dignity, and moving uneasily from leg to leg like a chained elephant.

"Did she hurt you?" he asked, seeking to steady his voice.

Ern shook his head.

"She laid about me middlin tidy," he admitted. "But she didn't not to say hurt me. She don't know how—a woman don't. Too much flusteration along of it."

Edward Caspar collapsed into a chair.

"What happened?" he asked.

Ern recounted the story truthfully, the white glimmer in his face coming and going between pants as he told.

"Why d'you let him lead you astray?" asked the father irritably, at the end.

Ern wagged his head slowly and began to scrape once more with his foot.

"Alf's artfuller nor me!" he said at last in a shamefaced way.

Both boys turned up at Sunday-school next morning: Alf defiant, Ern abashed.

Mr. Pigott ignored the former, snubbed him brutally when occasion offered, and showed himself benignant to the prime sinner.

After chapel Mrs. Caspar spoke to him.

"I don't know what you think of my son, Mr. Pigott," she began.

"Which son?" asked the other in his bluff way.

"Why, Ernie to be sure. He's always bringing shame upon me."

"He's worth twice the other," cried Mr. Pigott, letting off steam.

"Ah, yes, you've got your favourites, Mr. Pigott!" retorted the woman.

"And I'm not the only one!" answered the outraged schoolmaster. "Ern's a boy. And boys will be boys, as we all know. But he's a little gentleman, Ern is. He's his father over again."

The comparison of Ernie to his father, however well intentioned, always touched Mrs. Caspar on the raw. Her eyes sparkled. Every now and then she reminded you forcibly that her grandmother had lived in a by-street—off Greyhound Road, Fulham.

"Ah," she muttered vengefully, "I'll cut his little liver out yet, you'll see."

Mr. Pigott rounded on her, genuinely shocked.

"And you a religious woman!" he cried. "Shame on you!"

"I don't care," answered Mrs. Caspar. "I see it coming. I always have. And it's just more than I can bear."

Mr. Pigott did not understand the cause of the woman's emotion, but he recognized that it was genuine and so respected it.

"Well, he's leaving school now," he said more gently. "He'll settle down once he's got his nose to the grindstone."

Later, at the meeting of the Bowling Green Committee, in the Moot, the schoolmaster reported Mrs. Caspar's saying to Mr. Trupp.

"She's a hard un," he commented.

"She's need to be," growled the other.

"What's that, Doctor?" asked Mr. Pigott.

"If she let go of him, he'd be dead in a month," mumbled Mr. Trupp.

"Mr. Caspar would?"

The Doctor looked at the grey church-tower bluff against the sky.

"But she won't let go," he added. "She's got her qualities."

"She has," said Mr. Pigott, treading the green. "She's a diamond—as hard, as keen."

The two always sparred when they met and loved their friendly bouts. Both were radicals; but they had arrived at their convictions by very different routes. The schoolmaster had inherited his opinions from tough, dissenting ancestors, the man of science had acquired them from Huxley and Darwin. Politics the pair rarely discussed, except at election time; for on that subject they were in rough agreement. But the two men wrangled genially over religion, the ethics of sport, even the two Caspar boys; for Mr. Trupp was the one man in Old Town who alleged a preference for the younger boy—mainly, his wife declared, because he must be "contrary."

Mr. Pigott now told the stubborn man almost with glee the story of Alf's treachery.

"What d'ye think of that now?" he asked defiantly.

"Why," grunted the Doctor, "what I should expect."

"Of course," said the sarcastic Mr. Pigott.

"He's got the faults of his physique," continued the other. "He's afraid of a thrashing because he knows it'd kill him. Self-preservation is always the first law of life."

"He's a little cur," said Mr. Pigott. "That's what your young Alf is."

"I've no doubt he is," replied the Doctor. "You would be too if you'd got that body to live in."

"I'd be ashamed," shouted the other. "I'd commit suicide offhand."

"The wonder is he's alive at all," continued Mr. Trupp, quite unmoved. "Must have some grit in him somewhere or he'd have died when he was born."

"That's you and his mother," said the schoolmaster censoriously. "Saving useless human material that ought to be scrapped. And you call yourself a Man of Science! In a properly ordered community you'd stand your trial at Lewes Assizes, the two of you—for adding to the criminal classes. Now if we were back in the good old days, they'd have exposed Alf at birth—and quite right, too."

"Quite so," said Mr. Trupp. "Your Christianity has a lot to answer for, as I've remarked before."

It fell to Mr. Pigott to find a job of work for Ernie when his favourite left school: for at that date there were no Labour Bureaux, no Juvenile Advisory Committees, no attempt to make the most of the country's one solid asset—its Youth. And the rich had not yet made their grand discovery of the last twenty-five years—that the poor have bodies; and that these bodies must be saved, even if it cost a little more than saving their souls, which can always be done upon the cheap.

Mr. Pigott had little difficulty in his self-imposed task, for he did not mean to remain a schoolmaster all his life, and was already dabbling in the commercial life of the growing town.

Ernie started as an office-boy in a coal-merchant's office in Cornfield Road by the Central Station, which formed the junction between the Old Town and the New.

Before the boy embarked on his career, Mr. Pigott invited him to tea and lecture.

"It's your own fault if you don't get on," said the schoolmaster aggressively after the muffins. "Rests with yourself. Office boy to President—like they do in America. Make a romance of it."

"I shall try, sir," cried Era, with the easy enthusiasm characteristic of him.

"I'll lay you won't, then!" retorted the other rudely. "I'll lay all the work I've put into you these ten years past goes down the drain. Now your grandfather..."

He stopped short, remembering Mrs. Caspar had told him that their origin had been kept from the two boys....

At his new job Ern did not work very hard. It was not in him to do that; for he had his father's complete lack of ambition. But he worked just enough to keep his place, to pay his mother for his keep by the time he was seventeen, and have some "spending money," as he called it, over, with which to buy cigarettes, and join the cricket club. In time he even attained to the dignity of an office stool: for his handwriting was excellent, his ability undoubted, and his education as good as most.

"Ern don't lick the stamps no more. He writes the letters," was Alf's report at home.

The younger brother too had now launched out upon the world. But Alf was very different from Ern. He had his own ideas from the start and went his own way. Somehow he had ferreted out the facts about his grandfather's career; and that career it was his deliberate determination to surpass.

Those were the early days of the motor industry and the petrol engine. Alf made his mother apprentice him to Hewson and Clarke, an enterprising young engineering firm in the East End, off Pevensey Road.

"No Old Town for me," he said knowingly. "New Town's the bird!"

And the boy worked with the undeviating energy of an insect. All day he was busy at the shop, and in the evening came home, grimy and tired, to have a wash and then settle down in the kitchen to study the theory of the petrol-engine.

His mother, ambitious as her son, watched him with admiration, guarding his hours of study jealously from interruption.

"He's his grand-dad over again," she confided to her husband in one of their rare moments of intimacy.

Edward Caspar shook his head. He was interested in his second son, although in his heart of hearts he disliked the boy. He disliked ambitious men—their restlessness, their unhappy egoism, their incapacity to give themselves to any cause from which they would not reap personal advantage, offended his spiritual sense; and he followed with amused benevolence the careers of his contemporaries at Harrow and Trinity who were reaping now the fruits of Orthodoxy, and just becoming Cabinet Ministers, Bishops, Judges, and the like.

"Alf hasn't got my father's physique," he said.

"You wait," Anne replied. "He'll conquer that too. Last time Mr. Trupp saw him he said he'd do now—if he took care."

Ern watched his brother's feverish activities with ironical smiles.

"He's like a little engine himself," he said. "No time to look around and take a little pleasure in life. All the while a-running along the lines—puff-puff-puff!—with his nose to the ground. Not knowin where he's goin or why; only set on getting somewhere, he don't know where, some day, he don't know when."

Himself he preferred the leisurely life, and was known among his friends as Gentleman Ernie. The office, which prided itself upon its tone, for in it worked a youth who said he had been at a public school, had taken the country accent off his tongue. Ern was indeed a bit of a dandy now, who oiled his hair, and took an interest in his ties; while Alf never spent a penny on his clothes, was always shabby, and seldom clean. The dapper young clerk and the grimy little mechanic, on the rare occasions when they appeared in the streets together, formed a marked contrast, of which Ernie at least was aware.

"You'd never know em for brothers," the passers-by would remark.

Both had arrived at the age when the young male joins a gang, curious about women, but inclining to be suspicious of them. Alf, however, strong in himself, continued on his prickly and independent way. He was not drawn to others, nor were others drawn to him. Companionable Ern, on the other hand, who was everybody's friend, was absorbed into a gang; but he was different from his gang-mates. He used less hair-oil than they did, and wore more modest ties. Moreover, there was nothing of the hooligan about him.

"Such a gentlemanly lad," said Mrs. Trupp. "That's his father coming out in him."

"May the resemblance end there," muttered Mr. Trupp.

The lady speared her husband on the point of her needle.

"Croakie!" she remarked.

Ern could have been a leader among his mates, had he chosen to assume authority. His quiet, his distinction, his happy manner, and above all the fact that he was a promising cricketer and had made half a century on the Frying Pan at Lewes for the Sussex Colts against the Canterbury Wanderers, marked him out. But Ern would not lead. He spent his evenings in the main at home rather than in the lighted streets, and was at his happiest sitting in the study opposite his father. On these occasions the two rarely spoke, but they enjoyed a silent communion that was eminently satisfying to them both. Just sometimes the father would touch the revolving book-case on his right; take out one of the little blue poetry books Ern knew so well, and read The Scholar Gypsy or The Happy Warrior.

Ern loved that, but he was far too indolent to pursue the readings himself. When his father had finished, he would return the book to its place and say,

"You should read a bit yourself, Boy-lad," and Ern's invariable reply would be,

"I will, dad, when I got the time."

But Ern was one of those who never had the time and never would have.

Then the two would relapse into smoke and silence and vague dreams, out of which Edward Caspar's voice would emerge,

"Where's Alfred?"

To which Ern would answer with a faint smirk,

"Studyin in the kitchen."

Ern's tendency to be a masher, as the phrase of the day went, delighted Mr. Pigott. He looked on it as the best sign he had yet detected in the boy.

"Who's the lady, Ern?" he chaffed, meeting the lad.

The boy smiled shyly. At such moments, in spite of his plainness, he looked beautiful.

"Haven't got one, sir," he said.

It was true, too. His attitude towards girls was unlike that of his mates. He neither chirped at them in the streets, nor avoided them aggressively, nor was self-conscious in their presence. He was always friendly with them, even affectionate; but he went no farther. Some of the Old Town maidens wished he would. But, in fact, this was not Ern's weakness.

The Destroyer, who lies in wait to undo us all, if we give him but a crevice through which to creep into our citadel, was taking the line of least resistance, as he does in every case.

There began to be rumours in Old Town. His father's weakness, known to all, lent these rumours wing. In Churchy Beachbourne, as the enemy called the town by reason of the number and variety of its consecrated buildings, people were swift to believe, eager to hand on their beliefs.

Prebendary Willcocks—which was his proper title—or Canon Willcocks—as he had taught the locality to call him—who had reasons of his own for disliking Edward Caspar, heard and shook his aristocratic head, repeating the rumour to all and sundry in a lowered voice. The Lady Augusta Willcocks, that indefatigable worker in the parish for God and the Tory Party, entirely lacking in her husband's delicate feeling, echoed it resonantly.

Mr. Pigott was honestly aghast.

"Never!" he cried, and added—"God help him if his mother hears!"

He was so genuinely concerned indeed that he went round to 60 Rectory Walk to find out by indirect examination if Mrs. Caspar had heard.

She had; and was distraught.

"If he takes to that, I'll turn him out of the house!" she cried savagely. "Straight I will!"

And there was no question that she meant what she said.

"The best way to make trouble is to meet it half-way," muttered the schoolmaster, cowed for once by the woman's terrible emotion. "Give the boy a chance—even if he is your own son."

"Alf says he was blind at the match," the other answered doggedly.

"Alf!" scoffed Mr. Pigott, savage in his turn. "I wouldn't care that what Alf says about his brother. I know your Alf."

"And I don't then," said Mrs. Caspar. "I try to keep it fair between em—for all what folks may say different."

That evening Mr. Pigott met Alf in Church Street.

The schoolmaster stopped, holding with his eye the youth in the stained blue overall. Alf approached him delicately, with averted face and a sly smile.

It was clear that he courted the encounter.

Mr. Pigott came to the point at once.

"How's Ern?" he boomed in a voice of challenge.

Alf dropped his eyes.

"Beg pardon, sir," he said, "our Ern's goin the same way as dad."

Mr. Pigott gazed at him as one stupefied.

Then in a flash he understood ... Mr. Trupp was right. The boy was abnormal: his spirit dwarfed and stunted by the miserable tenement in which it was forced to dwell.

This sudden peep into one of the sewers of Nature, this illumination of what before had been to him obscure, this swift suggestion of Evil lurking obscenely in the dusk to leap on the unwary, brought him up abruptly. His anger passed for the moment. Something between fear and pity laid hold of him.

"I suppose you're glad," he said quietly.

Alf smiled that satyr-like smile of his, sickly and uncertain.

"Ah, you never did like me, Mr. Pigott!" he sneered.

"I don't," answered Mr. Pigott. "I never did. But I'm beginning to understand you. You're possessed."

He went on down the street and called at the Manor-house.

Mrs. Trupp was, he knew, a staunch friend of Ernie's.

The lady was playing with her children in the garden. But she gave both her ears to her visitor when she knew his errand. Had she heard anything?

Mrs. Trupp coloured. She had heard something which greatly perturbed her pure and beautiful spirit.

Her Joe, home from Rugby, had reported that on the way back from a match at Lewes Ernie Caspar had taken a drop which had made him funny.

"It was only a little," the lady ended. "Joe said it wasn't enough to make an ordinary canary queer. But it upset Ernest for the moment."

Mr. Pigott marched on down the hill to the railway station.

It was shutting-up time, and the object of his concern was just leaving the office.

Mr. Pigott unceremoniously seized the boy by the hand.

"For God's sake take a pull, Ern!" he said, most seriously.

Ernie looked up surprised, read the distress in the other's bearded face, and burned one of those sudden white flares of his.

"I see!" he said. "Alf's been at it again!" and he broke away.

Swiftly he went home, passed the study door, and entered the kitchen.

His mother was out.

Alf, his elbows on the table, and his chin on his hands, was studying a model-engine under the gas-light.

He looked up surlily as Ern entered.

"Keep out of it!" he ordered. "You've heard what mother says. The kitchen's mine at this time. I don't want you."

"But I want you, my lad," answered Ernie, brutal in his bitterness.

He locked the door, and took off his coat.

"Been tellin the tale again!" he trembled, as he rolled up his sleeves. "I've had more'n enough of it. Put em up! You're for it this journey!"

Alf had risen. He knew that look upon his brother's face, and was afraid.

"You mustn't touch me!" he screamed, shaking a crooked finger at the other. "I'm delicit, I am."

It was the ancient ruse which had stood him in good stead many a time at home and in the playground.

"Else you'll tell mother!" sneered Ern. "Very well. Have it your own way!"

He seized the model engine on the table, and smashed it down on to the floor. It lay at his feet, a broken mass, with spinning wheels.

Then Ern unlocked the door and went out.

At supper that evening he was still burning his white flare.

Alf saw it and was cowed; Mrs. Caspar saw it too and held her peace. Edward Caspar was, as always, away in the clouds and aware of nothing unusual when he looked in to say good-night.

Alf took no overt steps to avenge himself. Like old Polonius he went round to work, lying in wait for the chance he knew would come. He had not to wait long.

On the August Bank Holiday there was a big dance at the Rink in Cornfield Road. Ern attended. He danced well and was sought after as a partner.

Alf went too.

Ern was surprised to see his brother there, and pleased: for it was not in his nature to bear malice long.

"Hullo, Alf!" he chaffed. "Didn't know you was a dancing-man. Let me find you a partner then."

Alf shook his head, smiling that shifty smile of his.

"I ain't," he said. "I only come to watch."

That was true; but the words carried no sinister meaning to Ern's innocent ear.

Alf watched.

He sat by himself on one of the faded plush-seats that went round the hall. Nobody spoke to him, nobody heeded him. The seats on either side of him were left vacant.

Sour, shabby, ill at ease, yet sure of himself, he watched with furtive eyes the flow of boys and girls swirling by him in the dance.

One of Ern's friends pointed his brother out to him.

"I know," laughed Ern. "Let him alone. He don't want us. He's above larking, Alf is."

"Never seen him at a hop before," remarked the friend. "And now he don't look happy."

The evening was hot, the dancers thirsty, the drinks good. Alf observed his brother go to the bar once, twice, and again. Then he rose to go home, nodding to himself.

Ern passed him in the dance and stopped.

"What, Alf! You're off early!"

"I got a bit of reading to do," answered Alf.

"So long, then," said Ernie. "Shan't be long first myself." And he joined the current again, with flushed face and loquacious tongue.

It was just ten when Alf entered the kitchen.

His father had already retired to bed; his mother was sitting up.

"You're late," she remarked sharply. "Where's Ern?"

"Heard em say he was at the Rink," Alf answered sheepishly.

Mrs. Caspar's face darkened. The Puritan in her rose in arms.

"Dancing?" she asked.

Alf feigned uneasiness.

"I'll stay and let him in," he said. "He mayn't be back yet a bit."

Mrs. Caspar took her candle.

Regular as a machine, she rose always at six, and expected to be in bed by ten.

Anything that disturbed her routine she resented, surly as an animal.

"Let me know when he comes in," she said. "I'll speak to him. Keepin us up to all hours and disturbin dad's rest while he carries on. Might be a disorderly house."

She left the room.

Alf turned out the gas, and sat in the darkness, watching the dying fire, and waiting for his mouse.

A crisis in his life had come.

He was about to take the first big step along the road that was going to lead him to success or ruin.

He was aware of it, and calm as a practised gambler.

Once he rose and locked the front door to make sure his brother could not enter without his knowledge.

It was eleven o'clock when he heard feet outside.

Those feet told their own tale.

Alf turned up the light in the passage and opened the door.

His brother lolled against the side-wall like a mortally wounded man.

"Take my arm, old chap," said Alf, and supported his brother into the kitchen.

Ern sat down suddenly at the table. Alf lit the gas.

The light fell on his brother's foolish face and clearly irritated him. He put up his hand to brush it away.

"Arf a mo'," said Alf soothingly, skipped light-footed upstairs, and knocked at his mother's door.

She was half-undressed, brushing her hair, her neck and shoulders bare in the moonlight.

Alf glanced at them and even in that moment of excitement thought how beautiful they were.

Mrs. Caspar raised a finger.

Her husband was in bed and apparently asleep, Lady Blanche upon the mantelpiece staring vacantly at the form of her recumbent son.

"Ern!" whispered Alf, and jerked his head significantly. "You'd best come."

Anne Caspar slipped on a wrap. Candle in hand she descended the stairs and entered the kitchen.

Alf followed stealthily. Like a gnome he stood in the shadow at the foot of the stairs, biting his nails uneasily, as he watched with lewd, malignant eyes.

Ern sat at the table with the dreadful blind face of the living dead.

He saw his mother enter and paid no heed to her. He was too much occupied. A troubled look crossed his face, and clouded it. Then he was very sick.

That amused Alf.

His mother shut the kitchen-door.

But Alf was not to be defrauded of his spectacle.

He opened the door quietly.

His mother, busy on her knees, with a slop pail and cloth, looked up.

"It's only me, mum," muttered Alf.

Her face frightened him: so did her breathing: so did her quiet.

"Come in then," she said. "And shut the door."

Ern still sat at the table.

"You little og!" said Alf fiercely, and shook his brother.

His mother, still on her hands and knees, restrained him.

"Let him be," she said. "It's past that. It's past all."

The door opened slowly.

Mr. Caspar stood in it in the faded quilted dressing-gown that had once graced historic rooms at Trinity.

He stood there, dishevelled from sleep, a tall, round-shouldered ruin of a man, every sign of distress upon his face.

"What is it?" he asked nervously.

"Im!" said Alf.

Mr. Caspar saw Ern, and marked his wife busy on her knees. Then he understood.

The distress on his face deepened.

Anne Caspar rose sharply from her knees, the filthy rag still in her hands.

"Two of you!" she cried thickly. "It's too much!" and shoved him out of the room.

The father's slippered feet shuffled along the passage.

"Take your brother up to bed," ordered Mrs. Caspar.

Alf, too discreet to argue, obeyed.

Anne Caspar locked the door, and sat down at the table.

There was no doubt that Anne Caspar was a woman of character.

"Too much character," said Mr. Trupp.

His wife was somewhat shocked.

"Can you have too much character?" she asked.

Her husband was in one of his philosophical moods.

"Character's only will," he growled. "It's the repression or direction of energy. You may misdirect your energies. Most so-called strong men do. Look at this fellow Chamberlain. Willed us into this war. If it hadn't been for his superfluous character we should never have heard of South Africa."

"And your investments would never have gone down," said Mrs. Trupp delicately.

The Doctor may have been unjust to the Colonial Secretary, but he was right about Anne Caspar, whom he knew rather better.

That dour woman had, indeed, just two friends in Beachbourne. One was Mr. Trupp, and the other was Mr. Trupp's wife. Neither had ever failed her; and she knew quite well that neither ever would.

The day after the calamity she went round to see the Doctor.

"He's got to go," she said, tight-lipped and trembling. "That's flat. You know what I been through with his father, Mr. Trupp. You're the only one as does. I'm not going through it again with him. Ned's my man, and I'm going to see him through. But Ern must go his own way. Stew in his own juice, as Alf says. They say I've been hard with the boy. So I have. Because I've seen it a-comin ever since he was so high. And I've fought it and been beaten."

The gruff man was wonderfully tender with her. He saw the woman's distress and understood its cause as no other could have done.

"Don't do anything in a hurry," he said soothingly. "Think it over for a week and then come and see me again."

That evening he reported the interview to his wife.

"She'll never turn him out!" cried the kind woman.

"She will though," said Mr. Trupp.

Mrs. Trupp, pink and white with indignation, dropped her eyes to her work to hide the flash in them.

"I'll never forgive her if she does," she said.

"Yes, you will," retorted Mr. Trupp.

Mrs. Trupp answered nothing for a time.

"I shall go round to see her," she said at last with determination.

"You won't move her," the Doctor answered, grimly cheerful.

"No," said Mrs. Trupp. "She hasn't got a heart. As Mr. Pigott says, she's hard as the nether millstone in a frost."

Mr. Trupp put down his coffee-cup and licked his lips like a cat.

"My dear," he said, "you haven't been through her mill."

"Perhaps not," the other answered warmly. "But I am a mother."

The sympathetic creature, all love and pity, was as good as her word.

Mrs. Trupp was always full of indignation against Mrs. Caspar when away from her, and in her presence touched by the tragedy of the woman's loneliness.

She found things at Rectory Walk as she had expected or worse.

Ern had lost his job. His escapade at the Rink had reached his employers' ears. None too satisfied with the quality of the lad's work, they had seized the excuse to dismiss him.

"There he is!" cried Mrs. Caspar. "Just turn eighteen and back on my hands. Nobody won't have him, and I don't blame em neether."

"Where is he?" asked Mrs. Trupp.

The interview between the two women was taking place in the back sitting-room, where Mrs. Caspar always saw her rare visitors.

Anne nodded in the direction of the study.

"Settin along o dad," she said briefly. "Nothing but trouble along of it all. I took his cigarettes away. If he don't earn neether shan't he smoke, as Alf says. And now dad won't smoke because Ern can't. Sympathetic strike, Alf calls it. And it's dad's one pleasure. I allow him a shilling bacca-money a week. It's just all I do allow him."

"We all make mistakes—especially when we're young," said Mrs. Trupp gently.

The other was adamant.

"There's slips and slips," she retorted. "If he'd gone with a girl I'd have said nothing. But this!"

Mrs. Trupp was steadfast in her tranquil way, as her opponent was dogged.

"I know if my Joe made a mistake what I should do," she said.

"What then?" sharply.

"Forgive him," replied the other.

Mrs. Caspar flared up.

"You wouldn't, not if your Joe's father——"

She pulled up short.

Loyalty to her husband was the soul of Anne Caspar.

On her way home the Doctor's wife met Mr. Pigott.

The sanguine little man stopped short.

"You've heard?" said Mrs. Trupp.

The other nodded, surly as a baited bear.

"Ern was round at my place first thing Sunday to tell me. He kept nothing back." Mr. Pigott dropped his voice like a stage-conspirator. "That young Alf's at the bottom of this, I'll lay."

Mrs. Trupp was shocked.

"Did Ernie say so?"

"No," fiercely. "He wouldn't give his brother away—not he. But I know." He came closer. "I tell you the Devil's in that boy. I can see him leering at me from behind the mask of Alf's face. There is no Alf Caspar. He's only a blind. But there is a Devil!"

"O, Mr. Pigott!" murmured the lady.

"Yes, you may O Mr. Pigott me!" cried the wrathful man. "But I've watched. I know. He's the cuckoo kind, Alf is. He wants the place to himself. It's me and mum all the time. His father don't count; and Ern's to be jostled out of the nest. Then there'll be room for him to grow. I curse the day Mr. Trupp saved his miserable little life."

"Hush! hush! hush!" said the lady.

"Yes, I know Alf's one of Mr. Trupp's darlings," continued the other. "And I know why. You know my old bicycle they all laugh at. I bought it for ten shillings from a pedlar and patched it up myself. It's the worst bike in Old Town, but I saved it from the scrap-heap, so I think the world of it. Same with Mr. Trupp and young Alf."

Mrs. Trupp reported to her husband that Mr. Pigott had become almost blasphemous over Alf.

"I know," grunted the Doctor. "He's not fair to the boy. Alf's stunted; of course he's stunted. He's grown up all wrong. The wonder is he's grown up at all. He's a standing witness to the power of Nature to make the most of a bad job."

It was next day that Mrs. Caspar came round, as appointed, to see the Doctor, who was much more to her than a physician.

Mr. Trupp had now come to a decision as to the best course to be taken.

"You must send him right away," he said. "That's his best chance."

"Dad won't hear of the Colonies," the other replied. "Says it's so far and he'll never see the boy again once he gets out there. Stood up and fought me fairly!" And it was clear from the way she said it that the resistance encountered from her husband had been as rare as it was astonishing.

"I didn't mean the Colonies," the other replied.

"What then?"

"The Army."

Mrs. Caspar's face fell. She was momentarily shocked: for she belonged to a sect that had for generations been despitefully used by the powers that be. And the weapon of the powers that be is always in the last resort the Army.

"Discipline is what the boy wants," said Mr. Trupp. "It's what we all want."

Anne Caspar nodded dubiously.

"If it's the right sort," she said.

"It may save him," continued her mentor. "It can't do him any harm. And anyway, it's worth trying. You send Ernie round to me. I'll have a talk with him, and I'll drop in to-morrow and have a chat with his father."

Ernie, when approached, made no difficulty.

He was young; his enthusiasms were easily stirred; and the most famous of South Country regiments, the Forest Rangers, known in history as the Hammer-men, had been more than living up to its reputation in South Africa.

"You'll travel," Mr. Trupp told him. "Go to India as like as not and see a bit of the world. Our Joe's going to Sandhurst next year. Nothing'll do but he must be a Hammer-man—like his grandfather before him. I dare say he'll join you out there."

But if Ern was too young to fight his own battles, there was one doughty warrior who meant to fight them for him.

Mr. Pigott came round to see the Doctor in roaring wrath.

The South African War was in full swing. The frenzy of lusty paganism, called Imperialism, which was sweeping the country, had revolted the schoolmaster and many more. In the estimation of these, the horrors enacted at home in the name of God and Empire surpassed the obscenities of the war itself. Mr. Pigott saw Militarism as a raddled prostitute dancing on the souls and bodies of men.

He burst like a tempest into Mr. Trupp's consulting room.

"The Army!" he cried. "You're going to send that boy into the Army! Take him a first-class ticket to Hell at once! Where's your Militarism led us? The war's costing us half a million a week! Over a thousand casualties at Paardeberg alone! Rowntree stoned in York; Leonard Courtney boycotted in London; Lloyd George escaping for his life over the house-tops for daring to preach Christ! And you call yourself a Radical, Mr. Trupp!—Shame on you!"

Mr. Trupp listened, amused and patient.

"It's discipline he wants," he said at last. "He's soft and slack. He'll never do any good without it. The artist type like his father."

The other began to blaze again.

"Discipline!" he cried. "You talk like a Prussian drill-sergeant. I tell you that lad's got a soul. You discipline beasts of the field—with a Big Stick; but you grow souls."

Mr. Trupp shook his head.

"We're only just emerging from the mud," he said. "The Brute still lurks in all of us. Watch him or he'll catch you out. And remember the only thing the Brute understands is the Big Stick. Without it he'll either go to sleep—like Ernie; or pounce on some one who has gone to sleep—like Alf."

Mr. Pigott drew himself up. There was about him the dignity of conviction.

"Mr. Trupp," he said. "Fear never made a man yet. Faith's the thing."

The Doctor lifted his shrewd kind face, and eyed the other through his pince-nez.

"Fear plays its part too," he said. "We none of us can do without the Lash as yet."

There was no difficulty with Edward Caspar.

He had made an immense effort and fought about the Colonies. Easily spent, he would not fight again. Moreover, Ernie committed to the Army was committed for a few years only, and not for life; and some of his service might very well be passed in England. In Edward Caspar too, pacifist though he personally inclined to be, there was no inherited prejudice to overcome: for the Beauregards had been soldiers for generations.

Mr. Trupp came to talk things over; and that evening, as father and son sat together in the study, Edward Caspar said out of the silence, very quietly,

"Boy-lad, it's best you should go."

"I shall go all right, dad," the boy answered, feigning a cheerfulness he by no means felt. "Don't you worry."

"Mother wants it," the other continued.

"She's all right, mother is," said the lad.

It was settled that the boy should go over to Lewes and enlist in the Hammer-men at the depot there, on Saturday.

The decision made, his mother relaxed somewhat. While she still kept Ernie without money, she allowed him cigarettes.

Father and son sat together and smoked in the evenings, watching the trees swaying against the blue in the Rectory Garden across the road.

Alf reported surreptitiously to his mother that Ern was smoking with dad.

"What's it to do with you if he is?" answered the other tartly.

The catastrophe which had severed the frayed string that joined the mother and her eldest son had reacted unfavourably on her relations with Alf.

The few days before Ern's departure went with accustomed speed.

On the last evening, as he and his father sat together, studying their toes in the twilight, a small fire flickering in the grate, Edward Caspar spoke out of the dark which he had been waiting to cover him.

"Boy-lad, I can't do by you as I should wish," he said tremulously. "But here's a bit of something to show you I mean well."

In the half light he thrust an envelope towards his son.

Ern opened it and saw that it contained a five-pound note.

The great waters surged up into his throat and filled his eyes.

"Here! I can't keep this, dad," he said chokily. "I'm all right. I've got..."

The old man—for such he was to his son, though not yet fifty—waved his hand irritably.

"Put it away," he said, "put it away. Let's hear no more of it."

Ernie sat dumb, moved and wondering.

Where had dad got the money from?

He knew very well that his mother jealously controlled the family purse, doling out rare sixpences or shillings to his father; and he knew why.

The boy's brain moved swiftly.

"What's the time, dad?" he asked, and lit the gas.

The clock on the mantel-piece never went: for it was Edward Caspar's solitary household task to wind it up.

The father, by no means a match for his artful son, produced from a baggy pocket a five-shilling Waterbury watch in place of the old gold hunter that had come to him from Lady Blanche's father, the twelfth Earl Ravensrood.

His ruse successful, Ernie delivered a direct attack.

"Where's the ticket, dad?" he asked casually.

"What ticket?"

"The pawn-ticket."

"I don't know," irritably. "Don't worry me. Turn out the light. I want to get a nap."

Ernie obeyed.

Soon Edward Caspar's breathing told its own tale.

Ernie rose, and, knowing his father's habits well as he knew his own, put his hand into the Jacobean tankard that stood on the book-shelf.

There he found what he sought.

Quietly he went out into the passage.

On the ticket was the name he expected: Goldmann, the Jew pawn-broker in the East-end off the Pevensey Road.

For a moment he paused, fingering the brown cardboard ticket under the gas light.

It would not take him an hour to get down to Goldmann's and back; for the tram almost passed the door; but he hadn't got the redemption money. He hadn't got a penny in the world. Alf had seen to that.

With the impetuous gallantry peculiar to him he made up his mind and opened the kitchen-door. Where Ernie loved he would risk anything, face anybody—even his mother.

She sat in her Windsor chair by the fire, a Puritan, still beautiful, reading her Bible as she always did at this hour; and her silvering hair added to her distinction.

All their married life the pair had sat thus of evenings, Edward in the study, Anne Caspar in the kitchen.

The strange couple rarely met indeed except at night. And the arrangement was not of Edward Caspar's making, but of his wife's. It may be that in part the woman preferred the kitchen as the environment to which she was most used: it was still more that she had determined from the outset of their union never to intrude upon her husband's spiritual life, or attempt to encroach upon a mind she could not understand. Her duty was as clear to her from the first as were her limitations. She could and would cherish, support, protect, and even chasten her husband where it was necessary for his good. For the rest she was resolved to be no hindrance or inconvenience to him. He should gain by his marriage and not lose by it. Therefore from the start she had slammed the door without mercy or remorse on her own relatives.

When Ern entered, she looked up at him not unkindly through her spectacles.

"What is it, Ernie?" she asked.

He rushed out his request.

"Please, mum," he panted, "could you let me have a shilling?"

He was determined not to give his father away.

To his relief his mother rose without a word, went to a drawer, unlocked it, took out half a sovereign and gave it to him.

Ernie ran out without his hat, took the old horse-bus at Billing's Corner, and riding on the top under a night splendid with stars that hung in the elms of Saffrons Croft, he went down the hill, through the Chestnuts, past the railway station, and along the gay main-street.

Just before Cornfield Road reaches the sea he exchanged the horse-bus for the electric tram that swung him down Pevensey Road through the thronged and always thickening East-end.

At the Barbary Corsair in Sea-gate he descended, turned down a side-street, and entered a door over which hung the three golden balls taken from the coat-of-arms of the banker Medici.

Mr. Goldmann was a short, fair Jew, without a neck, immensely thick throughout, though still under thirty. When he walked he carried his arms away from his side as though to aid him to inflate; and winter or summer he could be found behind his counter, perspiring freely. His trousers were always too short, and his little legs protruded from them like pillars. He spoke Cockney without a trace of Yiddish. His manner was hearty; but he was honest of his kind. The police had nothing against him, while his innumerable clients complained less of him than of his rivals.

Ern in the past had dealt with him.

"How much?" he asked, presenting the ticket.

"Only two-pence," said Goldmann, and took the watch out of the case.

He handled it with care, almost covetously, burnishing it on his sleeve.

"What arms is them?" he asked, displaying the back.

Ernie didn't know.

"If it had been any man but your father left it, I'd have communicated with the police," said the pawn-broker cheerfully.

"Will you do it up in a piece of paper, please?" Ern requested.

The Jew obeyed.

"Lend me your stylo alf a mo," said Ernie, and wrote on the paper covering the word Dad.

Then he raced home and re-entered the kitchen.

It was after ten, but his mother was still up, and apparently unconscious of the lateness of the hour.

Ern, panting from the speed at which he had travelled, paid nine shillings and four pence into his mother's lap.

Tram and bus had cost him sixpence, and the redemption money the rest.

"Eightpence all told," he gasped, "what I wanted. Only a little something for dad. I'll send you the odd money when I draw me first pay." He put the little packet on the mantel-piece. "Will you give that to dad, please, when I'm gone, mum?"

His mother looked at him, a rare sweetness in her eyes.

"You may keep the change, Ern," she said gently.

Collecting the money from her lap, she handed it back to him.

A moment he demurred, taken aback; then slipped the cash into his trouser pocket, mumbling and deeply moved.

"Thank you kindly, mum," he muttered.

Her eyes were still on his face, and he could not meet them.

"You're a good lad, Ern," she said quietly.

The words, and the way of saying them, moved the lad more than all her rebuffs and brutalities in the past had done. His chest began to heave. She stood before him stiff as a blade of steel, as slight and straight.

For a second she laid her hand, fine still for all its toil, upon his arm.

"Go up to bed now," she said in the same very quiet way.

He went hurriedly.

There were few things which happened in that house of which Anne Caspar was not aware. That morning on rising she had missed her husband's watch on the dressing-table—and had said nothing. Later she had found the pawn-ticket in the tankard—and again had held her peace.

A wife before all things, yet to some extent a mother, she had known, had understood, had perhaps sympathized.

Next day, after dinner, when she heard Ern's feet slowly descending the stairs, and knew he was coming to say good-bye, Anne Caspar shoved Alf roughly out of the kitchen.

"You wait your brother outside," she said. "Take his bag now, and carry it to the bus for him. Be a brother for once!"

"Well, I was going to," answered Alf, aggrieved.

Since the catastrophe he had kept discreetly in the background.

Ern entered the kitchen, uncertain of himself, uncertain of his reception; but, true to the best that was in him, trying to carry a pale feather of gallantry.

"I guess it's about time to be off, mum," he remarked huskily.

His mother shut the door behind him gently, and drew him to her.

"Kiss me, Ern," she said.

The boy gasped and obeyed.

"Now go and say good-bye to dad," continued his mother, quiet, firm, authoritative.

As he went into the passage, he heard the kitchen-door close behind him.

Ern was his father's son, and nothing was to be allowed to intrude in the parting between the two.

Edward Caspar stood before the fire in quilted dressing-gown, somewhat faded now.

In its appointed place on the chair beside his chair lay the familiar manuscript, much as Ern had known it since his childhood, save that the titles on the covering page were typewritten now—The Philosophy of Mysticism, Part I, The Basis of Animism.

His father's colourless hair was greying fast and becoming sparse; while his always ungainly figure was losing any shape it had ever possessed.

At fifty Edward Caspar was already old. But age had enhanced the wistfulness which had marked him, even in youth. His was the face of a man who has failed, and is conscious of his failure; but it was the face of a Christian, gentle and very sad. Here clearly was a man of immense parts, scholar, thinker, artist, who, somehow baffled by the wiles of Nature, had failed to make good.

Yet in spite of his failure there were few who could more surely rely upon the limitless resources of the Spirit in the hour of his need than Edward Caspar.

And now in this great moment of his life, when he was parting from his dearest, he summoned to his aid all the powers that, massed unseen in the silence, await our call.

There was a wonderful dignity and restraint about him.

Ern, the most intuitive of lads, felt it and drew from his father's strength.

Simply and beautifully father and son kissed.

A moment the eyes of each rested in the other's.

Then it was over.

No one of us is entirely inhuman.

Something of the spirit of the scene enacted in the study had conveyed itself even to Alf awaiting in the road outside, Ern's bag at his feet.

He was blinking when his brother, blowing his nose, joined him.

Ern glanced at the green rampart of the Downs rising like a wall at the end of the road, and huge Shadow Coombe where the lambs were folded in March and where once he had passed a night in the shepherd's hut.

Ern waved to them and Beech-hangar beyond.

"Good-bye, old Downs!" he called. "You and me been good old pals!"

Then they set off for the bus at Billing's Corner, neither speaking, neither wishing to, Alf carrying his brother's bag. Both youths were slight and colt-like, yet with loose unshackled limbs; Ern rather smart, Alf distinctly shabby.

The Rector, tall and titupping, emerged from his gate as they passed, but refrained from seeing them. He did not approve of the two Caspar boys—in the main because they were the sons of their father.

Canon Willcocks aped—successfully enough—the walk and deportment of a thoroughbred weed. His face—which was aquiline—inspired his pose, which was aristocratic and satirical. His solitary hero was Louis Napoleon, whom he had worshipped from childhood. And he bore himself habitually as one who is too fine for the coarse world in which he dwells perforce. The two brothers nudged each other as he stalked by. Then they climbed to the box-seat of the old bus and established themselves beside the driver.

"Where away then?" he asked, seeing the bag.

"Off to see the world, Mr. Huggett," answered Ern, already cheering up. "Goin for the week-end to the North Pole, me and Alf!"

The bus jolted down the street, past the long-backed church with its mighty tower looking down upon the Moot as it had done for five centuries, and stopped opposite the Star. Ern for the last time touched the old coaching bell with the driver's whip. As it clanged sonorously, a window in the Manor-house opened.

Ern looked up to see Mrs. Trupp and her daughter, a fair flapper now, waving at him with eyes that smiled and shone.

"Good-bye!" they called. "Good luck!"

Saffrons Croft was white with cricketers as they passed. The honest thump of the ball upon the bat, the recumbent groups under the elms, even the imperious voice of Mr. Pigott umpiring on Lower Pitch, moved Ern strangely.

Alf's presence somehow helped him to be hard.

At the Central Station the boys got down.

They paced the platform, waiting for the train.

Alf babbled at large, his brother paying little heed.

"Be the making of you!" Alf was saying in his rather patronizing way. "See the world!—knock about!—come home a full-blown Hammer-man with a fat pension and a V.C. on your chest and a Colonel's commission! And we'll all meet you at the stytion with a brass band playing See the Conquering Hero Comes! and be proud of you. I'd come along meself for company, only I'm too small."

Ern roused from his dreams.

"What will you do then?" he asked, faintly ironical.

"Me?" cried Alf, starting off on his favourite topic. "I ain't a-goin to stop in Beachbourne all me life, you lay. When I'm through me apprentice they may send me to the River Plate. Got a big branch there. England's used up. There's chances in a new country for a chap that means to get on."

Ern installed himself in a smoking carriage.

"O, reservoir," said Alf, facetious to the end.

"See ye again some day," answered Ern, puffing away and exhibiting a man-of-the-world-like stoicism he did not feel.

He took off his Trilby hat, unbuttoned the overcoat with the velvet collar, and opened his orange-coloured Answers.

The train moved on. The brothers waved. Alf stood on the platform, a mean little figure with a dishonest smile; his clothes rather shabby, his trousers too short and creased behind the knees.

Then he turned to the bookstall and asked if Motor Mems, the paper on the new industry, had arrived yet.

Ern leaned back in his corner; and his eyes sought, between hoardings and roofs of crowded railway-shops, the familiar outline of the Downs which would accompany him to Lewes—and far beyond.

The Army did for Ernie neither what Mr. Trupp hoped nor what Mr. Pigott feared.

Ernie was in truth very much the modern man, and had absorbed unconsciously the spirit of industrial democracy. He was open-minded, intelligent and sincere. The false idealism that is at the back of all Militarism, the bully-cum-bluff principle that has been the creed of the barrack-square at all times all over the world, from Sparta to Potsdam, made no appeal to him. In the British Army, it is true, there was even at that date little of the spirit of orthodox Militarism, but the shadow of the Continental System and the heritage of a false tradition still hung over it.

He found himself plucked out of the world of to-day with its quick flow of ideas, its give and take, its elasticity, its vivid unconscious spirituality, and plunged back into the darkness of medievalism: forced labour, forced worship, forced obsequiousness, a feudal lord against whom there was no appeal, with corrupt retainers who squeezed the serf without mercy.

When his first drill-instructor in a moment of patronizing confidence informed the squad of which Ernie was a member that "It's swank as makes the soldier," others were amused; but Ernie, who giggled dutifully with the rest, thought how silly and how disgusting.

Ernie always remembered that drill-sergeant's illuminating remark, and placed it alongside that of a veteran Colonel, dating from Crimean days, who said in Ernie's hearing with the offensive truculence that a certain type of officer still thinks he owes it to himself and to his position to cultivate,

"That man's no good to me." He was speaking of a Company Sergeant-Major who had the manners of a gentleman. "Take him away and shoot him. I want a man who'll chuck his chest, and beat his leg, and own the barrack square."

Ernie saw very soon that the Army system was based on the old two-class conception with an insuperable barrier between the two classes, and the underclass deprived of the right to appeal, the right to combine, the right to strike. And he saw equally clearly, and with far more surprise, that in spite of its obvious limitations, and openness to brutality and abuse, the system worked astonishingly well, given good officers—and his own were unusually good upon the whole.

Ernie did not know that the barrack was in fact the heir of the old monastic habit and tradition with its herding together of males, its little caste of priests who alone possessed the direct access to God denied to common men, its sacrosanct dogmas, its insuperable prejudices, its life of unquestioning obedience to authority with the consequent thwarting of intellectual and spiritual development that is the outcome of free communion between man and man; and on the other hand its genuine religious fervour, its abnegation, its devotion to duty, and disinterested service of the Commonwealth.

Ern, it is true, who realized some of these things and was dimly conscious of others, was different from most of his mates and superior to them: rather more intelligent and much more refined. The bulk of them were the conscripts of Necessity; some, like himself, had made mistakes; a few, nearly always themselves the sons of old soldiers, were genuine volunteers.

And yet Ern was by no means unhappy. If he was something of a critic, he was not in the least a rebel. At first the pressure of discipline served to brace the boy, as Mr. Trupp had anticipated. Moreover, if he vaguely apprehended what was vicious in the military system, there was much he could not fail to enjoy, because he was young, virile and healthy; and not a little he could honestly admire. He loved the drill: the rhythmical marching en masse, the movements of great bodies of men swinging this way and that like one, actuated by a single purpose, directed by a single mind, worshipping a single God enthroned at the saluting-point, satisfied his religious spirit, exalted and transfigured him as did nothing he was to know in later days. The outdoor existence, the hard athleticism, the good fellowship, and above all the communal life, appealed to all that was best in him. Indeed in this organization, abused by advanced thinkers in Press and Parliament alike, he was to find a fullness of corporate life, an absorption of the individual in the mass, a bee-like enthusiasm for the hive, such as he was never to discover outside the Army in after years.

Moreover there was a goal held before his eyes, as it is held before the eyes of all young English soldiers.

That goal was India.

The Shiny was the Private Soldier's Paradise, the old hands would tell the young in the canteens at night.

"Things are different there, my boy. In the Shiny a swoddy's a gentleman. Punkah-wallahs to pull the cords in the hot weather, a tiger curled at your feet to keep the snakes at bay, bearer to clean your boots, shooting parties, bubbly by the barrel, I don't know what all."

Because of this jewel that was for ever dangled before his eyes, Ernie bore a good deal without complaining.

A youth who had enlisted with him, and for much the same reason, induced his people to buy him out after six months.

Ernie made no such attempt.

"I'm going through with it now," he said. "Want to see a bit before I'm done and take em home a tale or two."

After a spell of service in Ireland, at the close of the South African War, when Ernie was turned twenty, the expected call came.

A draft was going out to join the First Battalion of the Hammer-men at Jubbulpore, and Ernie went with it.

The cheering transport dropped down the Thames one misty November afternoon, passing hay-laden barges, timber ships from the Baltic, and rusty tramps from all over the world.

The smell of the sea, so familiar and so good, thrilled Ernie's susceptible heart. It spoke to him of home, of the unforgotten things of childhood, of his passing youth, of much that was intimate and dear. He spent most of that first evening on deck, long after dark, in spite of the drizzle, watching the coast lights.

Once they passed quite close to a light-ship, swinging desolately on the tide.

"What's that?" he asked a sailor.

"Sovereign Light," the man told him.

Ernie leapt to the name familiar to him from childhood.

How often had he not climbed the hill behind his home of winter evenings, and waited in the chalk-pit above the larch spinney for that far-off spark to leap out of the darkness and warm his expectant heart.

He swung about and stared keenly through the gloom at a light winking at them from the land.

"Then that's the light-house under Beau-nez!" he said, pointing.

"That's it," the man answered. "And Beachbourne underneath. All them lights strung out like a necklace along the coast,—Bexhill, Hastings, Beachbourne. It's growing into a great place. D'you know it?"

Ernie's heart and eyes were full.

"My home's there," he said. "And my old dad."

He stayed on deck peering through the darkness, till the last light had disappeared and they had swung round Beau-nez into the Channel and he could see the Seven Sisters, the gap that marks the mouth of the Ruther, and the cliffs between Newhaven and Rotting-dean. Then he went below and turned in.

Thereafter, his home behind him, he began to taste the new life, the life of adventure.

He felt the surge of the Atlantic, saw whales spouting in the Bay, marked off the coast of Portugal a lateen sail which first whispered of the East; gazed up at the Rock of Gibraltar, noted there caparisoned Barbs, their head-stalls studded with turquoises to keep the Evil One away, welcomed the Mediterranean sun, and gazed at the snow-capped hills of Crete.

In Port Said he landed and saw his first mosque. He examined it with interest.

Very bleak-like, he wrote home to Mr. Pigott. More like a chapel than a church. And more like the Quaker Meeting-house in the Moot than either. No stained glass or crucifixes or nothing. I was more at home there than the Catholics.

In the Canal he marked the black hair-tents of the travelling Bedouins, and saw a British Camel Corps trekking slowly across the desert against the hills beyond. He sweated in the Red Sea and gazed with awe at the sultry rocks of Aden, and followed with delight the flying-fish skimming across the Indian Ocean.

Then one dawn the engines stopped; the ship lay at rest; and in his nostrils, blown from the land, there was the smell of incense.

"Makes you think of the Queen of Sheba," said Ernie. "Spices and Tyre and Sidon and all the rest," and he closed his eyes and saw Mr. Pigott standing with the pointer before the black-board, addressing his class.

"Not alf," said his unimaginative friend. "Give me the Pevensey Road o Sadaday nights. Fried fish and chips."

They went on deck to find themselves lying in the lovely island-sprinkled harbour of Bombay; boats with curved bamboo yards and brown-skinned crews of pirates under the ship's side; and Parsee money-lenders in shining hats on deck offering to change the money of those who had any.

Ernie looked across to the land, lifting blue in the wondrous dawn—the land that was to be his home for the next six years.

Ernie joined his Battalion in the Central Provinces. The Forest Rangers, as famous in the South Country as the Black Watch in the Highlands, and of far longer pedigree, was first raised from the iron-ore workers by the Hammer Ponds on the Forest Ridge in the heart of the then Black Country of England to meet the imminent onslaught of the Spanish Armada. In those days the Hammer-men, as they were called familiarly from the start, watched the coast from the mouth of the Adur to Rye and Winchelsea; and in the succeeding centuries they left their bloody mark upon the pages of history, the memories of their fellow-countrymen, and the bodies of the King's enemies.

The most ancient of English regiments, it carries on its colours more honours than any but the 60th. For more than three tumultuous centuries it has been distinguished even in that British Infantry which has never yet encountered in war its match or its master. The splendid foot-soldiers of Spain broke in Flanders before its thundering hammer-strokes; in Flanders and elsewhere in later times the legions of Imperial France surged in vain against its bayonets; and in our own day the Prussian Guard, as insolent and vain-glorious as the veterans of Napoleon, has recoiled before the invincible stubbornness of the peasants of Sussex.

The officers were drawn almost exclusively from two or three of the oldest public-schools. Ernie found they were keen soldiers, and efficient, immensely proud of their regiment, athletic, and better-mannered than most. But as a whole they were singularly stupid men, deliberately blind to the wonders of the country in which they lived, proud of their blindness, and cultivating their insularity. There was one shining exception.

When the new draft paraded for inspection, a scarecrow Major wearing the South African ribands walked slowly up and down the ranks with a word for each man. He was very tall, and so lean as to be almost spectral. His voice was charming and leisured, reminding Ernie of his father. He was friendly too, almost genial. It was obvious that he based his authority on his own spiritual qualities and not on the accident of his position. There was no rattling of the sabre, no fire-eating, no attempt to put the fear of God into the hearts of the recruits.

When he came to Ernie, he asked,

"What name?"

"Caspar, Sir."

The Major looked at the lad from beneath his sun-helmet with sudden curiosity.

"Are you ..." he began, and pulled himself up short. "I hope you'll be happy as a Hammer-man," he said, and passed on.

Later he addressed the draft in a gentle little speech of the kind that annoyed his brother-officers almost past bearing.

"You have all heard of Death and Glory," he began. "Well, in this country there's a certain amount of Death going about, if you care to look out for it, but very little Glory. You have also heard no doubt from your mothers and the missionaries that the black man is your brother. It may be so. But in this country there are no black men and therefore no brothers. There are brown men who are your remote cousins; and they aren't bad fellows if you keep them in their place, and remember your own. On Sundays there is church for those who like it; and the same for those who don't. For the rest, whether you are happy or the reverse depends in the main upon your health, and your health depends in the main on yourselves. Be careful what you drink, and don't suck every stick of sugar-cane a native offers you. Remember you are Hammer-men and not monkeys. Most of you are men of Sussex, as are most of your officers; and we all know that the Sussex man wunt be druv. But discipline is discipline and must be maintained. We don't hammer each other more than we can help, nor do we hammer the natives more than is good for them. We exist to hammer the King's enemies. And now I wish you all well and hope you'll find the Regiment a real home."

Major Lewknor's long spidery legs carried him back to the bungalow where his wife awaited him.

She was a little woman, clearly Semitic, fine as she was strong, with eyes like jewels and the nose of an Arab.

"My dear," said the Major, "in your young days did you ever hear of one Hans Caspar?"

"My Jock, did I ever hear of one Napoleon Buonaparte?" mocked his mate. "What about him?"

"I was at Trinity with his son," replied the Colonel.

"We used to call him Hathri. A charming fellow, and a brilliant scholar, but——"

"What about him?" said Mrs. Lewknor, who seemed suddenly on the defensive.

"His son has just joined us," answered the Major. "In the ranks."

The lady handled the sugar-tongs thoughtfully. Her memory travelled back more than twenty years to a great ball in Grosvenor Square, and the timid son of the house, a gawky, awkward fellow with a reputation for shyness and brilliance. He could not dance, but under the palms in the conservatory, tête-à-tête, he could talk—as Rachel Solomons had never heard a man talk yet—of things she had never heard talked about: of a place called Toynbee Hall somewhere in the East End; of a little parson named Samuel Barnett; of the group of young University men—Alfred Milner, Arnold Toynbee, Lewis Nettleship—he and his wife were gathering about them there with the aim of bridging the gulf between Disraeli's Two Nations; of the hopes of a redeemed England and a new world that were rising in the hearts of many. That young man saw visions and had made her see them too. She had cut two dances to listen to that talk, and when at last an outraged partner had torn her away and Edward had said in his sensitive stuttering way, his face shining mysteriously,

"Shall we ever meet again?"

She had answered with astonishing emphasis,

"We must."

But they never did. Fate swung his scythe; her father died and she had to abandon her London season. Edward Caspar went abroad to study at Leipzig. And next winter she met her Hammer-man and launched her boat on the great waters.

But she had never forgotten that mysterious half-hour in which the trembling young man had knocked at her door, entered her sanctuary; and she, Rachel the reserved, had permitted him to stay.

At that moment Reality had entered her life—unforgettable and unforgotten.

India from the first tantalized Ernie. It was for him a mysterious and beautiful book, its pages for ever open inviting him to read, yet keeping its secret inviolate from him; for he could not read himself and there was no one to read to him. His officers, capable at their work, and good fellows enough in the main, Ernie soon discovered to be illiterate to an almost laughable degree. They not only knew nothing outside the limited military field, but they took a marked professional pride in their ignorance.

Ernie, used to his father's large philosophical outlook on any subject, his scholarly talk, his learning, was amazed at the intellectual apathy and crustacean self-complacency, sometimes ludicrous, more often naïf, occasionally offensive, of those set in authority over him.

Major Lewknor was the solitary exception. He was the one University man in the Regiment, and, whether as the result of a more catholic education or a more original temperament, he always stood slightly apart from his brother-officers. When he was a young man they had mocked at him quietly; now that he was a field officer they stood somewhat in awe of his ironical spirit. Some of his more dubious sayings were handed on religiously from last-joined subaltern to last-joined subaltern. The worst of them—his famous—Patriotism is the last refuge of every scoundrel—was happily attributed by the Army at large to a chap called Johnston who, thank God! was not a Hammer-man at all, but a Gunner or a Sapper or something like that. A Sapper probably. It was just the sort of thing you would expect a Sapper to say: for Sappers wore flannel shirts and never washed.

But if the Major was undoubtedly critical of what was obsolete and theatrical in the Service that he loved, few possessed a deeper reverence or more intimate understanding of the much that was noble in it.

"After the really grand ritual of a big ceremonial parade," he would say, "when you actually do transcend yourself and become one with the Larger Life, for grown men in an age like ours, to be herded at the point of the bayonet into a tin-pot temple to hear a gramophone in a surplice droning out an unintelligible rigmarole every Sunday in the name of religion—why it is not only redundant, it's a blasphemous farce that every decent man must kick against."

In spite of his caustic humour the Major's passion for the Regiment, to which he had given his life, steadfastly refusing all those staff-appointments for which he was so admirably fitted, was genuine as it was profound. Because of it, his much-tried brother officers, who loved him deeply if they feared him not a little, forgave him all. And if he was sadly unorthodox in many respects, as for instance that he was not a hard and fast Conservative, he was jealously orthodox in others as in that contempt for politicians which is almost an obsession amongst the men of his profession, perhaps because to them it falls to pay the price of the mistakes of their masters at Westminster.

The Major and his wife were in brief distinguished from their kind by the fact that they were mentally alive, sympathetic, keen, and knowledgeable. They had passed most of their lives in the East, and were of the few of their fellow-countrymen who had made the most of the opportunities vouchsafed to them. Indeed it was said in the Regiment that what the pair didn't know about India was not worth knowing.

Once at a halt on a route-march Ernie saw the Major, standing gaunt and helmeted in the shade of a banyan tree, take a pace out into the road.

A native, carrying two sealed pitchers slung from the ends of a bamboo, was padding down the road in the dust between the ranks of the soldiers who had fallen out.

The Major spoke to him, then turned to Ernie who was standing by.

"See that man, Caspar," he said quietly. "He's a pilgrim. He's tramped all the way from Hardwar, the source of the Ganges, to get holy water—seven hundred miles. What about that for faith?"

"Fine, sir," said Ernie, with quiet enthusiasm.

"In the days of Chaucer we used to do the same kind of thing in England," continued the Major. "Ever read the 'Canterbury Tales'?"

"Dad's read em to me, sir—in bits like."

The Major moved away.

Close by a group of officers, whose faces clearly showed how profoundly they disapproved of this conversation, were sprawling in the shade. That was the way to lose caste with the men. Amongst them was a last-joined lad, chubby still; the other was Mr. Royal of Ernie's company.

"What did the Major say he was?" asked the Boy keenly.

"I don't know what the Major said he was," answered Mr. Royal coolly. "And between ourselves I don't greatly care. I know what he was. And if you'll ask me prettily I might impart my information."

"What was he?" asked the Boy.

"He was a coolie," said Mr. Royal. "India's full of them. In fact they're the dominant class."

"I thought he looked something a bit out of the ordinary," said the snubbed Boy.

"Did you?" retorted Mr. Royal. "I thought myself he looked as if he wanted kicking. And as I've got five years' service to your three months it may be presumed that I'm right."

The Regiment was wonderfully well run for the men on its social side, for the Colonel was a bachelor, and much was trusted to Mrs. Lewknor.

She was at Ernie's bedside the day after he had his first attack of fever.

The little lady, so delicate, yet so strong, stood above the lad whose mother she might have been with a curious thrill.

He was so like his father, yet so unlike; and he was not only sick of fever, but dreadfully homesick too.

Mrs. Lewknor knew all about that, and the cure for it.

"Tell me about your people, Caspar," she said, after the ice had been broken.

The lad unloosed the flood-gates with immense relief.

He talked of Beachbourne, of Rectory Walk with the virginia-creeper on the wall and the fig-tree at the back; of his mother, of Mr. Pigott, even of Alf, and all the time of dad and the Downs.

On rising to go, Mrs. Lewknor said that when she came next day she would read to him.

"What shall I read?" she asked.

"Would you read me Matthew Arnold's Scholar-Gypsy?" said the boy.

Mrs. Lewknor looked down at the lad with brilliant eyes.

"Is that your father's favourite?" she asked.

"One of them, 'm. Wordsworth's the one."

There was only one man in the Regiment who possessed a Matthew Arnold, but that man happily was Mrs. Lewknor's husband.

Next day, as the little lady read the familiar lines, Ernie lay with eyes shut, the tears pouring down his face.

"Takes me right back," he said at last as she finished. "I'm not here at all. I'm laying just above the Rabbit-walk over Beech-hangar, with the gorse-pods snapping in the sun, and the beech-leaves stirring beneath me, and old dad with his hat over his eyes and his hands behind his head reciting."

That afternoon Mrs. Lewknor told Mr. Royal, who had dropped in to tea, that she had been reading Matthew Arnold to a man in his company.

Mr. Royal looked blank.

He had cold, speedwell blue eyes, that seemed all the brighter for his curly dark hair, a fine skin, rather pale, and an always growing reputation for hard efficiency.

"Matthew Arnold!" he said. "And who might Mr. Matthew Arnold be?"

He said it a thought aggressively. It was clear that not only had he never heard of Matthew Arnold, but that he would have considered it bad form to have done so.

"I believe he was a poet who seldom went to church," said the Major in the chi-chi voice which he could imitate to the life.

"Indeed," said Mr. Royal. "A poet!—Ah, I'm too busy for that sort of thing myself." He said it with a crushing air of finality.

When he had gone, Mrs. Lewknor looked at her husband with deprecatory eyes.

"My Jock," she said with a little sigh, "tell me!—Is it the system?—is it the man?—What is it?"

The Major sat upright on a little hard chair.

His eyes twinkled maliciously in his somewhat bony head. He looked like a gaunt satyr.

"My dear," he said, "in the British Army you must do as the British Army does. And there is one thing which the British Army Will Not tolerate, and that is—a cultivated mind."

"I don't think that's peculiar to the Army," replied Mrs. Lewknor. "The attitude's characteristic of our race."

Mr. Royal was not in fact popular among his brother officers. His superiors complained that his manner was slightly insolent, his juniors that it was so damn superior. The men liked him for his efficiency, and some women admired him—too much it was whispered.

Mrs. Lewknor followed Ernie's military career with quiet interest. Not that there was very much to follow: for Ernie, apart from the cricket-field, had no career.

He did not seek promotion, and was not in fact offered it. As Mr. Royal very truly said,—"He can't come it enough to make an N.C.O." The habit of authority indeed sat ill on his shoulders; but he was liked by officers and men; and his cricket gave him a place in the regimental team.

But there was little in Army life to do for Ernie the one thing essential self demands—encourage growth; and not a little to repress it.

When the first newness had worn off, Ernie was spiritually unsatisfied and solitary.

The grosser vices of the men never appealed to him, and the men themselves were not his sort. To get away from them he sometimes wandered far a-field, poking and prying into the temples of the various sects, and not seldom found himself in the crowded streets of the native city, a lonely khaki figure in a sun-helmet, regarding the many-coloured crowd, and asking himself, in the philosophical way he inherited from his father,

"What's the meaning of it all?"

It was on one of these rambles that the solitary incident of his career in India occurred to him.

He was standing at the foot of the hill in the native city of Lahore, watching the traffic in the narrow streets, when he saw a mem-sahib driving a tum-tum slowly through the heavy ox-traffic.

The syce for some reason had descended, and the lady was alone.

Just then a huge elephant with painted sides came swinging down the steep street, at the head of a religious procession, singing and clashing cymbals.

The lady's pony, a dun country-bred, took fright and bolted.

Ernie saw her face, quite calm beneath her solar topee, as she rushed past him, pulling at the run-away. It was Mrs. Lewknor.

A few yards down the street the wheels of the tum-tum cannoned into a sack borne by a small donkey. The donkey, already tottering beneath his load, collapsed and lay in the dust unable to rise.

The driver of the donkey, an unsavoury giant, pock-marked, abused the mem-sahib. A crowd gathered. The religious procession was held up, the elephant swinging his trunk discontentedly and spouting showers of dust over his flanks.

Ernie didn't like the look of things, for it was common talk in the lines that the native city was mutinous.

He came up quickly. The presence of the man in khaki steadied the crowd and stopped the chatter.

"Best get out of this, 'm," he suggested. "They look a bit funny."

He took the pony's head and turned him.

"You get up alongside me then," said Mrs. Lewknor.

He obeyed.

The crowd made way. The pock-marked man began again to beat his donkey. The procession resumed its march.

"One up for the Hammer-men!" the little lady laughed, as they emerged from the gate of the native city.

"Yes, 'm," said Ernie. "Only one thing. The native city's out of bounds for me."

Mrs. Lewknor smiled.

"I'm not one of the Military Police," she said....

That evening she put to her husband a question that had often puzzled her.

"Why doesn't Caspar get on?" she asked. "He's got twice the intelligence of men who go over his head."

"My dear," replied the Major with the sententiousness that grew on him with the greying years, "intelligence is the last thing we want in the ranks of the Army. Intelligence always leads to indiscipline. The Army wants in the lower ranks only one thing—what is called 'character.' And by character it means the quality of the bull who rammed his head against a brick-wall till he was unconscious and went at it again when he came round saying—My head is bloody but unbowed."

During Ernie's years of service the Battalion moved slowly North, exchanging the plains of the Central Provinces for the frosty nights and red sand-hills of the Punjauh.

Major Lewknor became Colonel; and Mr. Royal adjutant.

Ern and the new Colonel were curiously sympathetic; Ern and the adjutant the reverse.

It may be that the Colonel, unusual himself, and lonely because of it, recognized a kindred spirit in the man; it may be that he never forgot that Ern was the son of his old contemporary Hathri Caspar of Trinity; or perhaps Mrs. Lewknor played an unconscious part in the matter. It is certain that on the one occasion Ern was brought before him in the Orderly Room for a momentary lapse into his old weakness, the Colonel merely "admonished" the offender.

Captain Royal, a ruthless disciplinarian, was aggrieved.

"He's such a rotten slack soldier, sir," he complained, after the culprit, congratulating himself upon his escape, had disappeared.

"Isn't he?" said the Colonel, enjoying to the full the irritation of his subordinate. "That man'd be no earthly good except on service."

Even at the wicket indeed Ernie was only at his best when he had to try. A first-rate natural bat, he would have been left out of the regimental team for slackness but that, as the Sergeant-Major said,

"Caspar's always there when you want him most."

In fact, Ernie ended his career in the Army with something of a flourish.

The Regiment was playing the Rifle Brigade at Rawlpindi in the last round for the Holkar Cup. Half-way through the second day, when the Hammer-men were batting, a rot set in. There were still two hours to play when the last man went in.

"Who is it?" asked Mrs. Lewknor, keen as a knife.

"Your friend, Caspar, Mrs. Lewknor," answered the senior subaltern, one Conky Joe, with the beak of a penguin, the eyes of an angel, and the heart of a laughter-loving boy. "They're sending him in last for his sins in the field—which were many and grievous."

"He won't live long against their fast bowler," commented the Boy gloomily. "I know Caspar."

"I never like to differ from my superiors," said the Colonel. "But I'm not so sure."

"Nor am I," said Mrs. Lewknor defiantly.

The Colonel and his wife proved right. Ernie batted with astonishing confidence from the first. At the end of twenty minutes it was anybody's game. Royal, well into his second century, was flogging the ball all over the ground. And Ernie's clear voice—"Yes, sir! No, sir! Stay where you are!" gave new heart to the watching Hammer-men.

In the end the two men played out time with consummate ease, and were carried together off the ground.

"It was like bowling at two rocks," said one of the defeated side.

"Spiteful rocks too!" replied the other. "Stood up and slashed at you!"

The Colonel went up and shook hands with the victorious batsmen, and Mrs. Lewknor waved her parasol.

"Well done, Caspar!" she cried. "Stuck it out!"

A few days later, his time being up, Ernie was detailed for a draft for home.

The Colonel, on signing his papers, said that he was sorry to be parting, and meant it.

"Charming fellow!" he said to the Adjutant, when Ern had left the room.

"Yes," answered Captain Royal in his lofty way. "Too charming. He'll never be any good to himself or us either."

"I'm not so sure," replied the Colonel. "He's the sort that never does well except when he's got to."

That evening Ern went up to the Colonel's bungalow to say good-bye to Mrs. Lewknor.

"Where are you going?" asked the little lady.

"Back home, 'm," Ernie answered. "Old Town, Beachbourne. There's no place in the world to touch it."

Mrs. Lewknor smiled at his enthusiasm.

"I know it," she said. "The Colonel comes from those parts—Hailsham-way. Perhaps we shall follow you when we retire."

"Beachbourne!" mused the Colonel, after Ernie had departed. "Famous for two things: Mr. Trupp, the surgeon, who by a brilliant operation saved the other day the life of the man the world could have done best without, and the Hohenzollern Hotel."

"What's the Hohenzollern Hotel?" asked Mrs. Lewknor.