ng-hearted--but he had a generous intolerance of little
success. He did not ask rewards, but he prayed for the hope of a good
beginning or a gallant failure. The odd romance which lies in the
wanderer's brain welcomed the paradox. Alice and her bright hair
floated dim on the horizon of his vision, something exquisite and dear,
a memory, a voice, a note of tenderness in this last exhilaration. A
sentimental passion was beyond him; he was too critical of folly to
worship any lost lady; and he had no love for vain reminiscences. But
the girl had become the embodied type of the past. A year ago he had
not seen her, now she was home and childhood and friends to him. For a
moment there was the old heart-hunger, but the pain had gone. The
ineffectual longing which had galled him had perished at the advent of
his new strength.

For in this ultimate moment he at last seemed to have come to his own.
The vulgar little fears, which, like foxes, gnaw at the roots of the
heart, had gone, even the greater perils of faint hope and a halting
energy. The half-hearted had become the stout-hearted. The resistless
vigour of the strong and the simple was his. He stood in the dark gully
peering into the night, his muscles stiff from heel to neck. The
weariness of the day had gone: only the wound in his ear, got the day
before, had begun to bleed afresh. He wiped the blood away with his
handkerchief, and laughed at the thought of this little care. In a few
minutes he would be facing death, and now he was staunching a pin-prick.

He wondered idly how soon death would come. It would be speedy, at
least, and final. And then the glory of the utter loss. His bones
whitening among the stones, the suns of summer beating on them and the
winter snowdrifts decently covering them with a white sepulchre. No man
could seek a lordlier burial. It was the death he had always craved.
From murder, fire, and sudden death, why should we call on the Lord to
deliver us? A broken neck in a hunting-field, a slip on rocky
mountains, a wounded animal at bay--such was the environment of death
for which he had ever prayed. But this--this was beyond his dreams.

And with it all a great humility fell upon him. His battles were all
unfought. His life had been careless and gay; and the noble
commonplaces of faith and duty had been things of small meaning. He had
lived within the confines of a little aristocracy of birth and wealth
and talent, and the great melancholy world