nse,
but there was even more of it in his heart than in his face. So few
people had seen his young work--almost no one who really counted. He had
been ashamed of it, never showing it to bring on a conclusion, since a
conclusion was precisely what he feared. He whistled now while he let
his companion take time. He rubbed old panels with his sleeve and dabbed
wet sponges on surfaces that had sunk. It was a long time since he had
felt so gay, strange as such an assertion sounds in regard to a young
man whose bridal-day had at his urgent solicitation lately been fixed.
He had stayed in town to be alone with his imagination, and suddenly,
paradoxically, the sense of that result had arrived with poor Nash.

"Nicholas Dormer," this personage remarked at last, "for grossness of
immorality I think I've never seen your equal."

"That sounds so well," Nick returned, "that I hesitate to risk spoiling
it by wishing it explained."

"Don't you recognise in _any_ degree the grand idea of duty?"

"If I don't grasp it with a certain firmness I'm a deadly failure, for I
was quite brought up on it," Nick said.

"Then you're indeed the wretchedest failure I know. Life is ugly, after
all."

"Do I gather that you yourself recognise obligations of the order you
allude to?"

"Do you 'gather'?" Nash stared. "Why, aren't they the very flame of my
faith, the burden of my song?"

"My dear fellow, duty is doing, and I've inferred that you think rather
poorly of doing--that it spoils one's style."

"Doing wrong, assuredly."

"But what do you call right? What's your canon of certainty there?" Nick
asked.

"The conscience that's in us--that charming, conversible, infinite
thing, the intensest thing we know. But you must treat the oracle
civilly if you wish to make it speak. You mustn't stride into the temple
in muddy jack-boots and with your hat on your head, as the Puritan
troopers tramped into the dear old abbeys. One must do one's best to
find out the right, and your criminality appears to be that you've not
taken the commonest trouble."

"I hadn't you to ask," smiled Nick. "But duty strikes me as doing
something in particular. If you're too afraid it may be the wrong thing
you may let everything go."

"Being is doing, and if doing is duty being is duty. Do you follow?"

"At a very great distance."

"To be what one _may_ be, really and efficaciously," Nash went on, "to
feel it and understand it, to accept it, adopt it, embrace it