d's countrymen
had ever understood that light, or guessed at the first blink that it
was the battle star of Ireland.

"Nothing can ever alter it; it's in the wheels of the universe,"
went on Inglewood, in a low voice: "some men are weak and some strong,
and the only thing we can do is to know that we are weak.
I have been in love lots of times, but I could not do anything,
for I remembered my own fickleness. I have formed opinions, but I
haven't the cheek to push them, because I've so often changed them.
That's the upshot, old fellow. We can't trust ourselves--
and we can't help it."

Michael had risen to his feet, and stood poised in a perilous position
at the end of the roof, like some dark statue hung above its gable.
Behind him, huge clouds of an almost impossible purple turned slowly
topsy-turvy in the silent anarchy of heaven. Their gyration made
the dark figure seem yet dizzier.

"Let us..." he said, and was suddenly silent.

"Let us what?" asked Arthur Inglewood, rising equally quick though somewhat
more cautiously, for his friend seemed to find some difficulty in speech.

"Let us go and do some of these things we can't do," said Michael.

At the same moment there burst out of the trapdoor below them
the cockatoo hair and flushed face of Innocent Smith, calling to
them that they must come down as the "concert" was in full swing,
and Mr. Moses Gould was about to recite "Young Lochinvar."

As they dropped into Innocent's attic they nearly tumbled over its
entertaining impedimenta again. Inglewood, staring at the littered floor,
thought instinctively of the littered floor of a nursery.
He was therefore the more moved, and even shocked, when his eye fell
on a large well-polished American revolver.

"Hullo!" he cried, stepping back from the steely glitter as men step back
from a serpent; "are you afraid of burglars? or when and why do you deal
death out of that machine gun?"

"Oh, that!" said Smith, throwing it a single glance; "I deal life
out of that," and he went bounding down the stairs.

Chapter III

The Banner of Beacon

All next day at Beacon House there was a crazy sense that it was
everybody's birthday. It is the fashion to talk of institutions
as cold and cramping things. The truth is that when people are in
exceptionally high spirits, really wild with freedom and invention,
they always must, and they always do, create institutions