pes. A dead apathy of mind and muscle succeeded his mental
exertion and passion of thought. Increased age marked him, as though
Time, thrusting all at once upon him bitter experiences usually spread
over many years of a man's life, had weighed him down, humped his back,
thinned his hair, and furrowed his forehead under the load. Within his
eyes, behind the reflected blue of the sky, as he raised them to it, sat
mad misery; and an almost tetanic movement of limb, which rendered it
impossible for him to keep motionless even in his present recumbent
position, denoted the unnatural excitation of his nerves. The throb and
spasm of the past still beat against his heart. Like a circular storm in
mid-ocean, he told himself that the tempest had not wholly ended, but
might reawaken, overwhelm him, and sweep him back into the turmoil
again. As he thought, and his eye roved for a rider on a brown horse,
the poor wretch was fighting still. Yesterday fixed determination marked
his movements, and his mind was made up; to-day, after a night not
devoid of sleep, it seemed that everything that was best in him had
awakened refreshed, and that each mile of the long tramp across Dartmoor
had represented another battle fought with his fate. Justice, Justice
for himself and the woman he loved, was the cry raised more than once
aloud in sharp agony on that great silence. And only the drone of the
shining-winged things and the dry rustle of the grasshoppers answered
him.

Like the rest of the sore-smitten and wounded world, he screamed to the
sky for Justice, and, like the rest of the world, forgot or did not know
that Justice is only a part of Truth, and therefore as far beyond man's
reach as Truth itself. Justice can only be conceived by humanity, and
that man should even imagine any abstraction so glorious is wonderful,
and to his credit. But Justice lies not only beyond our power to mete to
our fellows; it forms no part of the Creator's methods with us or this
particular mote in the beam of the Universe. Man has never received
Justice, as he understands it, and never will; and his own poor,
flagrant, fallible travesty of it, erected to save him from himself, and
called Law, more nearly approximates to Justice than the treatment which
has ever been apportioned to humanity. Before this eternal spectacle of
illogical austerity, therefore, man, in self-defence and to comfort his
craving and his weakness, has clung to the cheerful conceit of
imm