ss!" said the young man, who had intelligence and was fresh
from hospital--"and awful hard luck!--he might have hurt his hand in a
score of ways and still have recovered the use of it, but with this
particular injury"--he shook his head--"nothing to be done! And the
worst of it is that a trouble like this, which cuts across a man's
career, goes so deep. The thing I should be most afraid of is his
general health. You can see that he's delicate--narrow-chested--a bundle
of nerves. It might be phthisis--it might be"--he shrugged his
shoulders--"well, depression, bad neurasthenia. And the poor lad seems
to have no family--no mother or sisters--to look after him. But he'll
want a lot of care, if he's to pull round again. An Oxford row, wasn't
it? Abominable!"

But here the sudden incursion of Lady Laura's maid to ask a question
for her mistress had diverted the doctor's thoughts and spared
Falloden reply.

* * * * *

A little later, he was riding slowly up the side of the moor towards
Scarfedale, looking down on a landscape which since his childhood had
been so intimate and familiar a part of himself that the thought of
being wrenched away from it, immediately and for good, seemed
merely absurd.

September was nearly gone; and the trees had long passed out of their
August monotony, and were already prophetic of the October blaze. The
level afternoon light was searching out the different planes of
distance, giving to each hedgerow, elm or oak, a separate force and
kingship: and the golden or bronze shades, which were day by day
stealing through the woods, made gorgeous marriage with the evening
purple. The castle, as he gazed back upon it, had sunk into the shadows,
a dim magnificent ghost, seen through mist, like the Rhine maidens
through the blue water.

And there it would stand, perhaps for generations yet, long after he and
his kindred knew it no more. What did the plight of its last owner
matter to it, or to the woods and hills? He tried to think of that
valley a hundred years hence--a thousand!--and felt himself the merest
insect crawling on the face of this old world, which is yet so young.
But only for a moment. Rushing back, came the proud, resisting sense of
personality--of man's dominance over nature--of the Nietzschean "will to
power." To be strong, to be sufficient to one's self; not to yield, but
to be forever counterattacking circumstance, so as to be the master of
circumst