of
the child he had been, and the old child's smile, fresh and credulous,
on the mouth.

The Doctor had not spoken for a moment. It might be that he was careless
of the poetic lights with which Mr. Howth tenderly decorated his old
faith, or it might be that even he, with the terrible intentness of a
real life-purpose in his brain, was touched by the picture of the far
old chivalry, dead long ago. The master's voice grew low and lingering
now. It was a labor of love, this. Oh, it is so easy to go back out of
the broil of dust and meanness and barter into the clear shadow of that
old life where love and bravery stand eternal verities,--never to be
bought and sold in that dusty town yonder! To go back? To dream back,
rather. To drag out of our own hearts, as the hungry old master did,
whatever is truest and highest there, and clothe it with name and deed
in the dim days of chivalry. Make a poem of it,--so much easier than to
make a life!

Knowles shuffled uneasily, watching the girl keenly, to know how the
picture touched her. Was, then, she thought, this grand dead Past so
shallow to him? These knights, pure, unstained, searching until death
for the Holy Greal, could he understand the life-long agony, the triumph
of their conflict over Self? These women, content to live in solitude
forever because they once had loved, could any man understand that?
Or the dead queen, dead that the man she loved might be free and
happy,--why, this _was_ life,--this death! But did pain, and martyrdom,
and victory lie back in the days of Galahad and Arthur alone? The
homely face grew stiller than before, looking out into the dun sweep of
moorland,--cold, unrevealing. It baffled the man that looked at it. He
shuffled, chewed tobacco vehemently, tilted his chair on two legs, broke
out in a thunder-gust at last.

"Dead days for dead men! The world hears a bugle-call to-day more noble
than any of your piping troubadours. We have something better to fight
for than a vacant tomb."

The old man drew himself up haughtily.

"I know what you would say,--Liberty for the low and vile. It is a
good word. That was a better which they hid in their hearts in the old
time,--Honor!"

Honor! I think, Calvinist though he was, that word was his religion. Men
have had worse. Perhaps the Doctor thought this; for he rose abruptly,
and, leaning on the old man's chair, said, gently,--

"It is better, even here. Yet you poison this child's mind. You make her