yes with what
seemed his sole remnant of linen.

"Dear, dear," sighed Searle, "I've made you cry! Well, we speak as from
man to man. I should be glad to think you had felt for a moment the
side-light of that great undarkening of the spirit which precedes--which
precedes the grand illumination of death."

Mr. Rawson sat silent a little, his eyes fixed on the ground and his
well-cut nose but the more deeply dyed by his agitation. Then at last
looking up: "You're a very good-natured man, sir, and you'll never
persuade me you don't come of a kindly race. Say what you please about a
chance; when a man's fifty--degraded, penniless, a husband and father--a
chance to get on his legs again is not to be despised. Something tells
me that my luck may be in your country--which has brought luck to so
many. I can come on the parish here of course, but I don't want to come
on the parish. Hang it, sir, I want to hold up my head. I see thirty
years of life before me yet. If only by God's help I could have a real
change of air! It's a fixed idea of mine. I've had it for the last ten
years. It's not that I'm a low radical. Oh I've no vulgar opinions. Old
England's good enough for me, but I'm not good enough for old England.
I'm a shabby man that wants to get out of a room full of staring
gentlefolk. I'm for ever put to the blush. It's a perfect agony of
spirit; everything reminds me of my younger and better self. The thing
for me would be a cooling cleansing plunge into the unknowing and the
unknown! I lie awake thinking of it."

Searle closed his eyes, shivering with a long-drawn tremor which I
hardly knew whether to take for an expression of physical or of mental
pain. In a moment I saw it was neither. "Oh my country, my country,
my country!" he murmured in a broken voice; and then sat for some time
abstracted and lost. I signalled our companion that it was time we
should bring our small session to a close, and he, without hesitating,
possessed himself of the handle of the Bath-chair and pushed it before
him. We had got halfway home before Searle spoke or moved. Suddenly
in the High Street, as we passed a chop-house from whose open doors we
caught a waft of old-fashioned cookery and other restorative elements,
he motioned us to halt. "This is my last five pounds"--and he drew a
note from his pocket-book. "Do me the favour, Mr. Rawson, to accept
it. Go in there and order the best dinner they can give you. Call for a
bottle of Burgundy