cleaning the firm's
windows to managing its business. For most of that long time he had
been absolutely immersed in dry, technical work, living with the one
idea of satisfying old clients and attracting new ones, until his mind
and soul had become as formal and precise as the laws which he
expounded. A fine and sensitive nature was in danger of being as warped
as a busy city man's is liable to become. His work had become an
engrained habit, and, being a bachelor, he had hardly an interest in
life to draw him away from it, so that his soul was being gradually
bricked up like the body of a mediaeval nun. But at last there came
this kindly illness, and Nature hustled James Stephens out of his
groove, and sent him into the broad world far away from roaring
Manchester and his shelves full of calf-skin authorities. At first he
resented it deeply. Everything seemed trivial to him compared to his
own petty routine. But gradually his eyes were opened, and he began
dimly to see that it was his work which was trivial when compared to
this wonderful, varied, inexplicable world of which he was so ignorant.
Vaguely he realised that the interruption to his career might be more
important than the career itself. All sorts of new interests took
possession of him; and the middle-aged lawyer developed an after-glow of
that youth which had been wasted among his books. His character was
too formed to admit of his being anything but dry and precise in his
ways, and a trifle pedantic in his mode of speech; but he read and
thought and observed, scoring his "Baedeker" with underlinings and
annotations as he had once done his "Prideaux's Commentaries." He had
travelled up from Cairo with the party, and had contracted a friendship
with Miss Adams and her niece. The young American girl, with her
chatter, her audacity, and her constant flow of high spirits, amused and
interested him, and she in turn felt a mixture of respect and of pity
for his knowledge and his limitations. So they became good friends, and
people smiled to see his clouded face and her sunny one bending over the
same guide-book.

The little _Korosko_ puffed and spluttered her way up the river, kicking
up the white water behind her, and making more noise and fuss over her
five knots an hour than an Atlantic liner on a record voyage. On deck,
under the thick awning, sat her little family of passengers, and every
few hours she eased down and sidled up to the bank to allow