yes--I believe it must
be so, although I had not expected to see it so soon. But I will go
with you, and we can talk by the way."

The two men quickly caught up with the other people, and all went
forward together along the road. The doctor had little to tell of his
experience, for it had been a plain, hard life, uneventfully spent for
others, and the story of the village was very simple. John Weightman's
adventures and triumphs would have made a far richer, more imposing
history, full of contacts with the great events and personages of the
time. But somehow or other he did not care to speak much about it,
walking on that wide heavenly moorland, under that tranquil, sunless
arch of blue, in that free air of perfect peace, where the light was
diffused without a shadow, as if the spirit of life in all things were
luminous.

There was only one person except the doctor in that little company
whom John Weightman had known before--an old book-keeper who had spent
his life over a desk, carefully keeping accounts--a rusty, dull little
man, patient and narrow, whose wife had been in the insane asylum for
twenty years and whose only child was a crippled daughter, for whose
comfort and happiness he had toiled and sacrificed himself without
stint. It was a surprise to find him here, as care-free and joyful as
the rest.

The lives of others in the company were revealed in brief glimpses as
they talked together--a mother, early widowed, who had kept her little
flock of children together and laboured through hard and heavy years
to bring them up in purity and knowledge--a Sister of Charity who had
devoted herself to the nursing of poor folk who were being eaten to
death by cancer--a schoolmaster whose heart and life had been poured
into his quiet work of training boys for a clean and thoughtful
manhood--a medical missionary who had given up a brilliant career in
science to take the charge of a hospital in darkest Africa--a
beautiful woman with silver hair who had resigned her dreams of love
and marriage to care for an invalid father, and after his death had
made her life a long, steady search for ways of doing kindnesses to
others--a poet who had walked among the crowded tenements of the great
city, bringing cheer and comfort not only by his songs, but by his
wise and patient works of practical aid--a paralysed woman who had
lain for thirty years upon her bed, helpless but not hopeless,
succeeding by a miracle of courage in her si