th--in his young manhood--even to
the present moment, jogging slowly along in a far country, rough and
wild, utterly dependent on the courtesy of a slight girl, who held, for
the moment, his life in her hands; for often, as he gazed into the void
of darkness over narrow ledges, he knew that only the skill of those two
small hands kept them from sliding into eternity: yet there was about
her such an air of wontedness to the situation that he was stirred by no
sense of anxiety for himself or for her.

He took out his pipe and smoked, still dreaming, comparing, and
questioning. Of ancient family, yet the younger son of three generations
of younger sons, all probability of great inheritance or title so far
removed from him, it behooved that he build for himself--what? Fortune,
name, everything. Character? Ah, that was his heritage, all the heritage
the laws of England allowed him, and that not by right of English law,
but because, fixed in the immutable, eternal Will, some laws there are
beyond the power of man to supersede. With an involuntary stiffening of
his body, he disturbed for an instant the slumbering child, and quite as
involuntarily he drew him closer and soothed him back to forgetfulness;
and they both dreamed on, the child in his sleep, and the man in his
wide wakefulness and intense searching.

His uncle, it is true, would have boosted him far toward creating both
name and fame for himself, in either army or navy, but he would none of
it. There was his older brother to be advanced, and the younger son of
this same uncle to be placed in life, or married to wealth. This also he
might have done; well married he might have been ere now, and could be
still, for she was waiting--only--an ideal stood in his way. Whom he
would marry he would love. Not merely respect or like,--not even
both,--but love he must; and in order to hold to this ideal he must fly
the country, or remain to be unduly urged to his own discomfiture and
possibly to their mutual undoing.

As for the alternatives, the army or the navy, again his ideals had
formed for him impassable bars. He would found his career on the saving
rather than the taking of life. Perhaps he might yet follow in the wake
of armies to mend bodies they have torn and cut and maimed, and heal
diseases they have engendered--yes--perhaps--the ideals loomed big. But
what had he done? Fled his country and deftly avoided the most
heart-satisfying of human delights--children to ca