he pondered
it the more did he sicken at what lay before him.

Wrought upon by Everard's fanaticism that day in Paris some three weeks
ago, infected for the time being by something of his adoptive father's
fever, he had set his hands to the task in a glow of passionate
exaltation. But with the hour, the exaltation went, and reaction started
in his soul. And yet draw back he dared not; too long and sedulously had
Everard trained his spirit to look upon the avenging of his mother as
a duty. Believing that it was his duty, he thirsted on the one hand to
fulfill it, whilst, on the other, he recoiled in horror at the
thought that the man upon whom he was to wreak that vengeance was his
father--albeit a father whom he did not know, who had never seen him,
who was not so much as aware of his existence.

He sought forgetfulness in Mr. Gay. He had the delicate-minded man's
inherent taste for verse, a quick ear for the melody of words, the
aesthete's love of beauty in phrase as of beauty in all else; and
culture had quickened his perceptions, developed his capacity for
appreciation. For the tenth time he called Leduc to light his pipe;
and, that done, he set his eye to the page once more. But it was like
harnessing a bullock to a cart; unmindful of the way it went and over
what it travelled, his eye ambled heavily along the lines, and when he
came to turn the page he realized with a start that he had no impression
of what he had read upon it.

In sheer disgust he tossed the book aside, and kicking away the second
chair, rose lythely. He crossed to the window, and stood there gazing
out at nothing, nor conscious of the incense that came to him from
garden, from orchard, and from meadow.

It needed a clatter of hoofs and a cloud of dust approaching from the
north to draw his mind from its obsessing thoughts. He watched the
yellow body of the coach as it came furiously onward, its four horses
stretched to the gallop, postillion lusty of lungs and whip, and the
great trail of dust left behind it spreading to right and left over the
flowering hedge-rows to lose itself above the gold-flecked meadowland.
On it came, to draw up there, at the very entrance to Maidstone, at the
sign of the "Adam and Eve."

Mr. Caryll, leaning on the sill of his window, looked down with interest
to see what manner of travellers were these that went at so red-hot a
pace. From the rumble a lackey swung himself to the rough cobbles of the
yard. From with