ever in their lives had they
been hurried. They seemed indeed to know that when they got there, there
would be nothing for them to do but to come back again. Beyond them,
through the tall trees, over some wooded foot-hills of the moorland and a
promised land of pinkish fields, pasture, and orchards, the prospect
stretched to the far sea. Heat clothed this view with a kind of
opalescence, a fairy garment, transmuting all values, so that the four
square walls and tall chimneys of the pottery-works a few miles down the
valley seemed to Courtier like a vision of some old fortified Italian
town. His sensations, finding himself in this galley, were peculiar.
For his feeling towards Miltoun, whom he had twice met at Mrs. Noel's,
was, in spite of disagreements, by no means unfriendly; while his feeling
towards Miltoun's family was not yet in existence. Having lived from
hand to mouth, and in many countries, since he left Westminster School,
he had now practically no class feelings. An attitude of hostility to
aristocracy because it was aristocracy, was as incomprehensible to him as
an attitude of deference.

His sensations habitually shaped themselves in accordance with those two
permanent requirements of his nature, liking for adventure, and hatred of
tyranny. The labourer who beat his wife, the shopman who sweated his
'hands,' the parson who consigned his parishioners to hell, the peer who
rode roughshod--all were equally odious to him. He thought of people as
individuals, and it was, as it were, by accident that he had conceived
the class generalization which he had fired back at Miltoun from Mrs.
Noel's window. Sanguine, accustomed to queer environments, and always
catching at the moment as it flew, he had not to fight with the
timidities and irritations of a nervous temperament. His cheery courtesy
was only disturbed when he became conscious of some sentiment which
appeared to him mean or cowardly. On such occasions, not perhaps
infrequent, his face looked as if his heart were physically fuming, and
since his shell of stoicism was never quite melted by this heat, a very
peculiar expression was the result, a sort of calm, sardonic, desperate,
jolly look.

His chief feeling, then, at the outrage which had laid him captive in the
enemy's camp, was one of vague amusement, and curiosity. People round
about spoke fairly well of this Caradoc family. There did not seem to be
any lack of kindly feeling between them and t