. "But
you're right as usual, Padre, and go to the heart of it while I'm being
merely superficial. According to my division your brother Archelaus is a
fox and an eagle and all the other lone things right enough, isn't he,
Ishmael?"

"Yes," said Ishmael slowly, "I think he is."

"Whereas you are the bee, the wolf, the cony," declared Killigrew.
"Isn't he, Padre?"

Boase smiled. "Shall I tell you what I think, Joe?" he answered, "It is
this. Ishmael is by circumstances and inclination a dweller in one spot,
and custom and humanity incline him to tie himself always more closely
to it and the people in it. But man is not as simple as your animals,
and in most of us is something alien, some strain of other instincts.
The man who lives intimately on one piece of earth may have a deep
instinct in spite, perhaps because, of it, to keep himself free and to
resent claims even while he acknowledges them. Just as a man who is free
to go where he likes, as you do, may carry his own chains with him. For
the only slavery is to oneself, and it is the man who flows inwards
instead of outwards who is not free."

"I wonder ..." said Killigrew.

"The real flaw in your argument, Joe," said Ishmael, "is that your lone
hunter in the animal world always has his mate and his young, whereas
when you make the division apply to mankind you class all that with the
herd and deny it to the man who would be free."

"Because that's how it translates into terms of humanity," said
Killigrew swiftly. "Civilisation has made the taking of a mate a bond as
firm as pack-law, and woe to him who, having yielded to it, transgresses
it. It is not I who have made that division, it is the world."

"He might have spared me this to-night ..." thought Judith.

Ishmael kept silence. He was thinking of the truth of what Killigrew had
been saying, and weighing it against this new flame that had sprung up
within him that day. Freedom--loneliness is the price paid for liberty,
he knew that. And he had found loneliness sweet, or, when not actually
that, at least very bearable. Yet even as he thought it he knew for him
there was, as ever, at any crisis of his life, only the one way. He had
that directness which, though seeing all ways--for it is not the same
thing as simplicity--yet never doubted as to the only one possible for
himself. On that long-ago day on the cliffs near St. Renny, when he had
played with the notion of running away to sea, he had known all alo