ing old-fashioned holsters.--And, as yesterday
upon the bridge, the ache of a pain at once sweet and terrible laid
hold of her, making her queerly faint. The single street, sun-covered,
sleepy, empty save for a brewer's dray and tax-cart or two standing
before the solid Georgian portals of the White Lion Inn, for a
straggling tail of children bearing home small shoppings and jugs of
supper beer, for a flock of gray geese proceeding with suggestively
self-righteous demeanour along the very middle of the roadway and
lowering long necks to hiss defiance at the passer-by, and for an old
black retriever dozing peacefully beneath one of the rustling sycamores
in front of Josiah Appleyard, the saddler's shop--all these, as she
looked at them, became uncertain in outline, reeled before Honoria's
eyes. For the moment she experienced a difficulty in keeping steady in
the saddle. But the horses still walked quietly, neck to neck, their
shadows, and those of their riders growing longer, narrower,
outstretched before them as the sun declined in the west. All the
future hung in the balance, but the scale had not turned as yet.

Then Richard's voice took up its parable again.

"Perhaps it's a rather fraudulently comfortable doctrine, yet it does
strike one that the justification of disaster, in all its many forms,
is the opportunity it affords the individualist. He may use it for
self-aggrandisement, or for self-devotion--though I rather shy at so
showy a word as that last. However, the use he makes of it isn't the
point. What is the point, to my mind at least, is this--though it
doesn't sound magnificent, it hardly indeed sounds cleanly--that
whatever trade fails, whatever profession, thanks to the advance of
civilisation, becomes obsolete, that of the man with the dust-cart, of
the scavenger, of the sweeper, won't."

Once more Richard smiled upon his companion charmingly, yet with
something of self-mockery.

"And so, you see, having knocked about enough to grow careless of
niceties of prejudice, and to acquire immense admiration for any
vocation which promises permanence, I join hands with the dustman. In
the light of science, and in that of religion alike, nothing really is
common or unclean. And then--then, if you are outcasted in any case as
some of us are, it's a little too transparently cheap to be afraid of
soiling----" He broke off.--"Away there to the left, Honoria," he said.
"You see the house? The yellow-washed one, wi