bled with the
delight of the visionary and the student, he was a new man. He was a
clever man, born out of his proper sphere, and with only so much
education as he had contrived to get at during a hard life. What came
to him he assimilated eagerly, and every one of those books in his
cupboard, rare old friends, had been read over a hundred times.

He ought to have had a chance in his youth, but his father was the
last man in the world to encourage out-of-the-way ambitions in his
sons. Father and mother were alike--hard, grasping, and ungracious.
The father, on the whole, was a pleasanter person than the mother,
with her long, pale, horse-face and ready sneer; he was only
uncompromisingly hard and ungenial to all the world.

There were other children besides these two, all long since dead or
scattered. Two of the boys had run away and gone to America; their
first letters home remained unanswered, and after one or two attempts
they ceased to write. The one girl had slipped into a convent, after a
horrified glimpse at the home-life of her parents when she had
returned from her boarding-school. She had been sent away to a convent
in a distant town while still a mere child. She had come and gone in
recurring vacations, still too childish to be more than vaguely
repelled by the unlovely rule of her home. But at sixteen she came
home 'for good'; very much for evil, poor little Eily would have said,
as she realised in its full sordidness the grinding manner of life
which was to be hers. No wonder she wet her pillow night after night
with her tears for the pure and gentle atmosphere of the convent, for
the soft-voiced and mild-eyed nuns, and the life of the spirit which
shone ideally fair by this appalling life of the world. So, after a
time, she had her will and escaped to the convent.

James could never understand why he, too, had not broken bounds, and
run off to America with Tom and Alick. Perhaps he was of a more
patient nature than they. Perhaps the life held him down. It was,
indeed, such a round of hard, unvarying toil that at night he was
content to drop down in his place like a dead man, and sleep as the
worn-out horses sleep, dreaming of a land of endless green pastures,
beyond man's harrying. Alick and Tom were younger. They had not had
time to get broken to hardship like him, and Patrick was yet a baby.
Friends or social pleasures were beyond their maddest dreams. Their
parents' idea of a life for them was one in