on a clean collar (which was
a daring and outrageous defiance of authority, which allowed but two a
week), and prepared to face consequences. The family brush and comb
were kept in a small bag which hung on a nail beside the scratched and
defaced old family looking-glass, and Paul was artistically at work upon
his hair when his mother entered the kitchen. The excellent woman sat
down to laugh, and Armstrong came in with his customary vague air of
patient thinking.

'William,' said Mrs. Armstrong, 'look at our Paul. Niver tell me the
hage of merricles is past Why, I believe he's fell in love!'

It was the perpetual astonishment of Paul's life that his mother
always knew and understood the things he would not have her know and
understand. Even now, at his tent-door, seeing all these dead hours so
clearly that he forgot his present existence altogether, he thought of
her half-malicious, wholly-humorous intuition with wonder. Why had she
never understood the things he would have given so much to have her
understand?

Armstrong smiled with a melancholy, tired sweetness.

'Larn to be tidy, lad,' he said. 'I like a self-respecting fellow that
honours his own person.'

'M'm,' said Mrs. Armstrong. 'You've got a five days' beard on, William.'

He looked at her, stroking his own bristly chin.

'Ay,' he said. 'This'll be Thursday. Paul, just be getting me my razor
and the brush and soap-box, there's a good lad.'

Paul obeyed, and then betook himself to the timber-grove, where he sat
rapt into meditations on the Vision. He had read whatever came within
his reach, good, bad, or indifferent, and his conscious thoughts were
always a patchwork of phrases. When he was put to mind the shop he read
the penny weeklies. He was fresh from one of the works of J. F. Smith,
the un-remembered prose laureate of the _London Journal_, who would have
been reckoned a giant of invention if he had lived in these days, and a
sentence from his latest chapter got into Paul's head and went round
and round: 'There lay the fair, gifted, almost idolized girl.' In Mr.
Smith's moving page the fair, gifted, almost idolized girl was dying,
and Paul did not as yet know enough of the story-teller's craft of that
day to be sure that she would recover in the next chapter. She mixed
herself with the lady of the sandy ringlets who had described him as a
dirty boy, and the pathos of the situation lent an added anguish to his
thoughts. How beautiful was the lady