an painfully.
Suddenly he reached out a hand for the paper. "Let me read," he said, in
a voice scarce above a whisper.

He essayed to take the paper calmly, but it trembled in his hands. He
spread it out and fumbled for his glasses, but could not find them, and
he gazed helplessly at the page before him. Soolsby took the paper from
him and read slowly:

"... Claridge Pasha has done good work in Egypt, but he is a generation
too soon, it may be two or three too soon. We can but regard this fresh
enterprise as a temptation to Fate to take from our race one of the
most promising spirits and vital personalities which this generation has
produced. It is a forlorn hope. Most Englishmen familiar with Claridge
Pasha's life and aims will ask--"

An exclamation broke from the old man. In the pause which followed he
said: "It was none of my doing. He went to Egypt against my will."

"Ay, so many a man's said that's not wanted to look his own acts
straight in the face. If Our Man had been started different, if he'd
started in the path where God A'mighty dropped him, and not in the path
Luke Claridge chose, would he have been in Egypt to-day wearing out his
life? He's not making carpets there, he's only beating them."

The homely illustration drawn from the business in which he had been
interested so many years went home to Claridge's mind. He shrank back,
and sat rigid, his brows drawing over the eyes, till they seemed sunk
in caverns of the head. Suddenly Soolsby's voice rose angrily. Luke
Claridge seemed so remorseless and unyielding, so set in his vanity
and self-will! Soolsby misread the rigid look in the face, the pale
sternness. He did not know that there had suddenly come upon Luke
Claridge the full consciousness of an agonising truth--that all he had
done where David was concerned had been a mistake. The hard look, the
sternness, were the signals of a soul challenging itself.

"Ay, you've had your own will," cried Soolsby mercilessly. "You've said
to God A'mighty that He wasn't able to work out to a good end what He'd
let happen; and so you'd do His work for Him. You kept the lad hid away
from the people that belonged to him, you kept him out of his own, and
let others take his birthright. You put a shame upon him, hiding who his
father and his father's people were, and you put a shame upon her that
lies in the graveyard--as sweet a lass, as good, as ever lived on
earth. Ay, a shame and a scandal! For your eyes were s