lorious
freshness--just when it pleases you--every morning. Now the Company has
the whole route and programme plotted out for me. Their clerks write me
letters demanding most indelicately why I haven't done this and that."

Winifred looked at him disapprovingly. "Civilization," she said,
"implies responsibility. You can't live just as you like without its
being detrimental to the community."

"Oh, yes," returned Sproatly with a rueful gesture, "it implies no end
of giving up. You have to fall into line, and that's why I kept outside
it just as long as I could. I don't like standing in a rank, and," he
glanced down at his cloth, "I've an inborn objection to wearing
uniform."

Agatha laughed as she caught Hastings' eye. She guessed that Sproatly
would be sorry for his candor afterwards, but to some extent she
understood what he was feeling. It was a revolt against cramping customs
and conventionalities, and she partly sympathized with it, though she
knew that such revolts are dangerous. Even in the West, those who cannot
lead must march in column with the rank and file or bear the
consequences of their futile mutiny. It is a hard truth that no man can
live as he pleases.

"Restraint," asserted Winifred, "is a wholesome thing, but it's one most
of the men I have met are singularly deficient in. That's why they can't
be left alone, but must be driven, as they are, in companies. It's their
own fault if they now and then find it a little humiliating."

There was a faint gleam in her eyes, at which Sproatly apparently took
warning, for he said no more upon that subject, and they talked about
other matters until he took his departure an hour or two later. It was
the next afternoon when he appeared again and Mrs. Hastings smiled at
Agatha as he and Winifred drove away together.

"Thirty miles is a long way to drive in the frost. I suppose you have
noticed that she calls him Jim?" Mrs. Hastings commented. "Anyway,
there's a good deal of very genuine ability in that young man. He isn't
altogether wild."

"His appearance rather suggested it when I first met him," replied
Agatha with a laugh. "Was it a pose?"

"No," said Mrs. Hastings reflectively. "I think one could call it a
reaction, and it's probable that some very worthy people in the Old
Country are to blame for it. Sproatly is not the only young man who has
suffered from having too many rules and conventions crammed down his
throat. In fact, they're rather plentiful