a heavy one, and scarcely had the doctor settled himself in his sleeves
than the giant waked and seized that silk-faced collar in a hot right
hand. There was rage in his face-rage and the realisation of new
emotions.

"I'm--I'm not so comfortable as I were," he said from the deeps of
his interior. "You'll wait along o' me, you will." He breathed heavily
through shut lips.

Now, if there was one thing more than another upon which the doctor
had dwelt in his conversation with me, it was upon the essential
law-abidingness, not to say gentleness, of his much-misrepresented
country. And yet (truly, it may have been no more than a button that
irked him) I saw his hand travel backwards to his right hip, clutch at
something, and come away empty.

"He won't kill you," I said. "He'll probably sue you in court, if I know
my own people. Better give him some money from time to time."

"If he keeps quiet till the stuff gets in its work," the doctor
answered, "I'm all right. If he doesn't... my name is Emory--Julian B.
Emory--193 'Steenth Street, corner of Madison and--"

"I feel worse than I've ever felt," said the navvy, with suddenness.
"What-did-you-give-me-the-drink-for?"

The matter seemed to be so purely personal that I withdrew to a
strategic position on the overhead bridge, and, abiding in the exact
centre, looked on from afar.

I could see the white road that ran across the shoulder of Salisbury
Plain, unshaded for mile after mile, and a dot in the middle distance,
the back of the one porter returning to Framlynghame Admiral, if such
a place existed, till seven forty-five. The bell of a church invisible
clanked softly. There was a rustle in the horse-chestnuts to the left of
the line, and the sound of sheep cropping close.

The peace of Nirvana lay upon the land, and, brooding in it, my elbow on
the warm iron girder of the footbridge (it is a forty-shilling fine
to cross by any other means), I perceived, as never before, how the
consequences of our acts run eternal through time and through space. If
we impinge never so slightly upon the life of a fellow-mortal, the touch
of our personality, like the ripple of a stone cast into a pond, widens
and widens in unending circles across the aeons, till the far-off
Gods themselves cannot say where action ceases. Also, it was I who had
silently set before the doctor the tumbler of the first-class lavatory
compartment now speeding Plymouthward. Yet I was, in spirit at least,