McKean.  He's the young man upstairs.  Have you met him?"
Joan hadn't: except once on the stairs when, to avoid having to pass her,
he had gone down again and out into the street.  From the doorstep she
had caught sight of his disappearing coat-tails round the corner.
Yielding to impishness, she had run after him, and his expression of
blank horror when, glancing over his shoulder, he found her walking
abstractedly three yards behind him, had gladdened all her evening.

Joan recounted the episode--so far as the doorstep.

"He tried to be shy with me," said Mrs. Phillips, "but I wouldn't let
him.  I chipped him out of it.  If he's going to write plays, as I told
him, he will have to get over his fear of a petticoat."

She offered her cheek, and Joan kissed it, somewhat gingerly.

"You won't mind Robert not wearing evening dress," she said.  "He never
will if he can help it.  I shall just slip on a semi-toilette myself."

Joan had difficulty in deciding on her own frock.  Her four evening
dresses, as she walked round them, spread out upon the bed, all looked
too imposing, for what Mrs. Phillips had warned her would be a "homely
affair."  She had one other, a greyish-fawn, with sleeves to the elbow,
that she had had made expressly for public dinners and political At
Homes.  But that would be going to the opposite extreme, and might seem
discourteous--to her hostess.  Besides, "mousey" colours didn't really
suit her.  They gave her a curious sense of being affected.  In the end
she decided to risk a black crepe-de-chine, square cut, with a girdle of
gold embroidery.  There couldn't be anything quieter than black, and the
gold embroidery was of the simplest.  She would wear it without any
jewellery whatever: except just a star in her hair.  The result, as she
viewed the effect in the long glass, quite satisfied her.  Perhaps the
jewelled star did scintillate rather.  It had belonged to her mother.  But
her hair was so full of shadows: it wanted something to relieve it.  Also
she approved the curved line of her bare arms.  It was certainly very
beautiful, a woman's arm.  She took her gloves in her hand and went down.

Mr. Phillips was not yet in the room.  Mrs. Phillips, in apple-green with
an ostrich feather in her hair, greeted her effusively, and introduced
her to her fellow guests.  Mr. Airlie was a slight, elegant gentleman of
uncertain age, with sandy hair and beard cut Vandyke fashion.  He asked
Joan's permission to continue his cigarette.

"You have chosen the better part," he informed her, on her granting it.
"When I'm not smoking, I'm talking."

Mr. McKean shook her hand vigorously without looking at her.

"And this is Hilda," concluded Mrs. Phillips.  "She ought to be in bed if
she hadn't a naughty Daddy who spoils her."

A lank, black-haired girl, with a pair of burning eyes looking out of a
face that, but for the thin line of the lips, would have been absolutely
colourless, rose suddenly from behind a bowl of artificial flowers.  Joan
could not suppress a slight start; she had not noticed her on entering.
The girl came slowly forward, and Joan felt as if the uncanny eyes were
eating her up.  She made an effort and held out her hand with a smile,
and the girl's long thin fingers closed on it in a pressure that hurt.
She did not speak.

"She only came back yesterday for the half-term," explained Mrs.
Phillips.  "There's no keeping her away from her books.  'Twas her own
wish to be sent to boarding-school.  How would you like to go to Girton
and be a B.A. like Miss Allway?" she asked, turning to the child.

Phillips's entrance saved the need of a reply.  To the evident surprise
of his wife he was in evening clothes.

"Hulloa.  You've got 'em on," she said.

He laughed.  "I shall have to get used to them sooner or later," he said.

Joan felt relieved--she hardly knew why--that he bore the test.  It was a
well-built, athletic frame, and he had gone to a good tailor.  He looked
taller in them; and the strong, clean-shaven face less rugged.

Joan sat next to him at the round dinner-table with the child the other
side of him.  She noticed that he ate as far as possible with his right
hand--his hands were large, but smooth and well shaped--his left
remaining under the cloth, beneath which the child's right hand, when
free, would likewise disappear.  For a while the conversation consisted
chiefly of anecdotes by Mr. Airlie.  There were few public men and women
about whom he did not know something to their disadvantage.  Joan,
listening, found herself repeating the experience of a night or two
previous, when, during a performance of _Hamlet_, Niel Singleton, who was
playing the grave-digger, had taken her behind the scenes.  Hamlet, the
King of Denmark and the Ghost were sharing a bottle of champagne in the
Ghost's dressing-room: it happened to be the Ghost's birthday.  On her
return to the front of the house, her interest in the play was gone.  It
was absurd that it should be so; but the fact remained.

Mr. Airlie had lunched the day before with a leonine old gentleman who
every Sunday morning thundered forth Social Democracy to enthusiastic
multitudes on Tower Hill.  Joan had once listened to him and had almost
been converted: he was so tremendously in earnest.  She now learnt that
he lived in Curzon Street, Mayfair, and filled, in private life, the
perfectly legitimate calling of a company promoter in partnership with a
Dutch Jew.  His latest prospectus dwelt upon the profits to be derived
from an amalgamation of the leading tanning industries: by means of which
the price of leather could be enormously increased.

It was utterly illogical; but her interest in the principles of Social
Democracy was gone.

A very little while ago, Mr. Airlie, in his capacity of second cousin to
one of the ladies concerned, a charming girl but impulsive, had been
called upon to attend a family council of a painful nature.  The
gentleman's name took Joan's breath away: it was the name of one of her
heroes, an eminent writer: one might almost say prophet.  She had
hitherto read his books with grateful reverence.  They pictured for her
the world made perfect; and explained to her just precisely how it was to
be accomplished.  But, as far as his own particular corner of it was
concerned, he seemed to have made a sad mess of it.  Human nature of
quite an old-fashioned pattern had crept in and spoilt all his own
theories.

Of course it was unreasonable.  The sign-post may remain embedded in
weeds: it notwithstanding points the way to the fair city.  She told
herself this, but it left her still short-tempered.  She didn't care
which way it pointed.  She didn't believe there was any fair city.

There was a famous preacher.  He lived the simple life in a small house
in Battersea, and consecrated all his energies to the service of the
poor.  Almost, by his unselfish zeal, he had persuaded Joan of the
usefulness of the church.  Mr. Airlie frequently visited him.  They
interested one another.  What struck Mr. Airlie most was the
self-sacrificing devotion with which the reverend gentleman's wife and
family surrounded him.  It was beautiful to see.  The calls upon his
moderate purse, necessitated by his wide-spread and much paragraphed
activities, left but a narrow margin for domestic expenses: with the
result that often the only fire in the house blazed brightly in the study
where Mr. Airlie and the reverend gentleman sat talking: while mother and
children warmed themselves with sense of duty in the cheerless kitchen.
And often, as Mr. Airlie, who was of an inquiring turn of mind, had
convinced himself, the only evening meal that resources would permit was
the satisfying supper for one brought by the youngest daughter to her
father where he sat alone in the small dining-room.

Mr. Airlie, picking daintily at his food, continued his stories: of
philanthropists who paid starvation wages: of feminists who were a holy
terror to their women folk: of socialists who travelled first-class and
spent their winters in Egypt or Monaco: of stern critics of public morals
who preferred the society of youthful affinities to the continued company
of elderly wives: of poets who wrote divinely about babies' feet and
whose children hated them.

"Do you think it's all true?" Joan whispered to her host.

He shrugged his shoulders.  "No reason why it shouldn't be," he said.
"I've generally found him right."

"I've never been able myself," he continued, "to understand the Lord's
enthusiasm for David.  I suppose it was the Psalms that did it."

Joan was about to offer comment, but was struck dumb with astonishment on
hearing McKean's voice: it seemed he could talk.  He was telling of an
old Scotch peasant farmer.  A mean, cantankerous old cuss whose curious
pride it was that he had never given anything away.  Not a crust, nor a
sixpence, nor a rag; and never would.  Many had been the attempts to make
him break his boast: some for the joke of the thing and some for the
need; but none had ever succeeded.  It was his one claim to distinction
and he guarded it.

One evening it struck him that the milk-pail, standing just inside the
window, had been tampered with.  Next day he marked with a scratch the
inside of the pan and, returning later, found the level of the milk had
sunk half an inch.  So he hid himself and waited; and at twilight the
next day the window was stealthily pushed open, and two small, terror-
haunted eyes peered round the room.  They satisfied themselves that no
one was about and a tiny hand clutching a cracked jug was thrust swiftly
in and dipped into the pan; and the window softly closed.

He knew the thief, the grandchild of an old bedridden dame who lived some
miles away on the edge of the moor.  The old man stood long, watching the
small cloaked figure till it was lost in the darkness.  It was not till
he lay upon his dying bed that he confessed it.  But each evening, from
that day, he would steal into the room and see to it himself that the
window was left ajar.

After the coffee, Mrs. Phillips proposed their adjourning to the "drawing-
room" the other side of the folding doors, which had been left open.
Phillips asked her to leave Joan and himself where they were.  He wanted
to talk to her.  He promised not to bore her for more than ten minutes.

The others rose and moved away.  Hilda came and stood before Joan with
her hands behind her.

"I am going to bed now," she said.  "I wanted to see you from what Papa
told me.  May I kiss you?"

It was spoken so gravely that Joan did not ask her, as in lighter mood
she might have done, what it was that Phillips had said.  She raised her
face quietly, and the child bent forward and kissed her, and went out
without looking back at either of them, leaving Joan more serious than
there seemed any reason for.  Phillips filled his pipe and lighted it.

"I wish I had your pen," he said, suddenly breaking the silence.  "I'm
all right at talking; but I want to get at the others: the men and women
who never come, thinking it has nothing to do with them.  I'm shy and
awkward when I try to write.  There seems a barrier in front of me.  You
break through it.  One hears your voice.  Tell me," he said, "are you
getting your way?  Do they answer you?"

"Yes," said Joan.  "Not any great number of them, not yet.  But enough to
show that I really am interesting them.  It grows every week."

"Tell them that," he said.  "Let them hear each other.  It's the same at
a meeting.  You wait ten minutes sometimes before one man will summon up
courage to put a question; but once one or two have ventured they spring
up all round you.  I was wondering," he added, "if you would help me; let
me use you, now and again."

"It is what I should love," she answered.  "Tell me what to do."  She was
not conscious of the low, vibrating tone in which she spoke.

"I want to talk to them," he said, "about their stomachs.  I want them to
see the need of concentrating upon the food problem: insisting that it
shall be solved.  The other things can follow."

"There was an old Egyptian chap," he said, "a governor of one of their
provinces, thousands of years before the Pharaohs were ever heard of.
They dug up his tomb a little while ago.  It bore this inscription: 'In
my time no man went hungry.'  I'd rather have that carved upon my
gravestone than the boastings of all the robbers and the butchers of
history.  Think what it must have meant in that land of drought and
famine: only a narrow strip of river bank where a grain of corn would
grow; and that only when old Nile was kind.  If not, your nearest
supplies five hundred miles away across the desert, your only means of
transport the slow-moving camel.  Your convoy must be guarded against
attack, provided with provisions and water for a two months' journey.  Yet
he never failed his people.  Fat year and lean year: 'In my time no man
went hungry.'  And here, to-day, with our steamships and our railways,
with the granaries of the world filled to overflowing, one third of our
population lives on the border line of want.  In India they die by the
roadside.  What's the good of it all: your science and your art and your
religion!  How can you help men's souls if their bodies are starving?  A
hungry man's a hungry beast.

"I spent a week at Grimsby, some years ago, organizing a fisherman's
union.  They used to throw the fish back into the sea, tons upon tons of
it, that men had risked their lives to catch, that would have fed half
London's poor.  There was a 'glut' of it, they said.  The 'market' didn't
want it.  Funny, isn't it, a 'glut' of food: and the kiddies can't learn
their lessons for want of it.  I was talking with a farmer down in Kent.
The plums were rotting on his trees.  There were too many of them: that
was the trouble.  The railway carriage alone would cost him more than he
could get for them.  They were too cheap.  So nobody could have them.
It's the muddle of the thing that makes me mad--the ghastly muddle-headed
way the chief business of the world is managed.  There's enough food
could be grown in this country to feed all the people and then of the
fragments each man might gather his ten basketsful.  There's no miracle
needed.  I went into the matter once with Dalroy of the Board of
Agriculture.  He's the best man they've got, if they'd only listen to
him.  It's never been organized: that's all.  It isn't the fault of the
individual.  It ought not to be left to the individual.  The man who
makes a corner in wheat in Chicago and condemns millions to
privation--likely enough, he's a decent sort of fellow in himself: a kind
husband and father--would be upset for the day if he saw a child crying
for bread.  My dog's a decent enough little chap, as dogs go, but I don't
let him run my larder.

"It could be done with a little good will all round," he continued, "and
nine men out of every ten would be the better off.  But they won't even
let you explain.  Their newspapers shout you down.  It's such a damned
fine world for the few: never mind the many.  My father was a farm
labourer: and all his life he never earned more than thirteen and
sixpence a week.  I left when I was twelve and went into the mines.  There
were six of us children; and my mother brought us up healthy and decent.
She fed us and clothed us and sent us to school; and when she died we
buried her with the money she had put by for the purpose; and never a
penny of charity had ever soiled her hands.  I can see them now.  Talk of
your Chancellors of the Exchequer and their problems!  She worked herself
to death, of course.  Well, that's all right.  One doesn't mind that
where one loves.  If they would only let you.  She had no opposition to
contend with--no thwarting and hampering at every turn--the very people
you are working for hounded on against you.  The difficulty of a man like
myself, who wants to do something, who could do something, is that for
the best part of his life he is fighting to be allowed to do it.  By the
time I've lived down their lies and got my chance, my energy will be
gone."

He knocked the ashes from his pipe and relit it.

"I've no quarrel with the rich," he said.  "I don't care how many rich
men there are, so long as there are no poor.  Who does?  I was riding on
a bus the other day, and there was a man beside me with a bandaged head.
He'd been hurt in that railway smash at Morpeth.  He hadn't claimed
damages from the railway company and wasn't going to.  'Oh, it's only a
few scratches,' he said.  'They'll be hit hard enough as it is.'  If he'd
been a poor devil on eighteen shillings a week it would have been
different.  He was an engineer earning good wages; so he wasn't feeling
sore and bitter against half the world.  Suppose you tried to run an army
with your men half starved while your officers had more than they could
eat.  It's been tried and what's been the result?  See that your soldiers
have their proper rations, and the General can sit down to his six-course
dinner, if he will.  They are not begrudging it to him.

"A nation works on its stomach.  Underfeed your rank and file, and what
sort of a fight are you going to put up against your rivals.  I want to
see England going ahead.  I want to see her workers properly fed.  I want
to see the corn upon her unused acres, the cattle grazing on her wasted
pastures.  I object to the food being thrown into the sea--left to rot
upon the ground while men are hungry--side-tracked in Chicago, while the
children grow up stunted.  I want the commissariat properly organized."

He had been staring through her rather than at her, so it had seemed to
Joan.  Suddenly their eyes met, and he broke into a smile.

"I'm so awfully sorry," he said.  "I've been talking to you as if you
were a public meeting.  I'm afraid I'm more used to them than I am to
women.  Please forgive me."

The whole man had changed.  The eyes had a timid pleading in them.

Joan laughed.  "I've been feeling as if I were the King of Bavaria," she
said.

"How did he feel?" he asked her, leaning forward.

"He had his own private theatre," Joan explained, "where Wagner gave his
operas.  And the King was the sole audience."

"I should have hated that," he said, "if I had been Wagner."

He looked at her, and a flush passed over his boyish face.

"All right," he said, "if it had been a queen."

Joan found herself tracing patterns with her spoon upon the tablecloth.
"But you have won now," she said, still absorbed apparently with her
drawing, "you are going to get your chance."

He gave a short laugh.  "A trick," he said, "to weaken me.  They think to
shave my locks; show me to the people bound by their red tape.  To put it
another way, a rat among the terriers."

Joan laughed.  "You don't somehow suggest the rat," she said: "rather
another sort of beast."

"What do you advise me?" he asked.  "I haven't decided yet."

They were speaking in whispered tones.  Through the open doors they could
see into the other room.  Mrs. Phillips, under Airlie's instructions, was
venturing upon a cigarette.

"To accept," she answered.  "They won't influence you--the terriers, as
you call them.  You are too strong.  It is you who will sway them.  It
isn't as if you were a mere agitator.  Take this opportunity of showing
them that you can build, plan, organize; that you were meant to be a
ruler.  You can't succeed without them, as things are.  You've got to win
them over.  Prove to them that they can trust you."

He sat for a minute tattooing with his fingers on the table, before
speaking.

"It's the frills and flummery part of it that frightens me," he said.
"You wouldn't think that sensitiveness was my weak point.  But it is.
I've stood up to a Birmingham mob that was waiting to lynch me and
enjoyed the experience; but I'd run ten miles rather than face a drawing-
room of well-dressed people with their masked faces and ironic
courtesies.  It leaves me for days feeling like a lobster that has lost
its shell."

"I wouldn't say it, if I didn't mean it," answered Joan; "but you haven't
got to trouble yourself about that . . . You're quite passable."  She
smiled.  It seemed to her that most women would find him more than
passable.

He shook his head.  "With you," he said.  "There's something about you
that makes one ashamed of worrying about the little things.  But the
others: the sneering women and the men who wink over their shoulder while
they talk to you, I shall never be able to get away from them, and, of
course, wherever I go--"

He stopped abruptly with a sudden tightening of the lips.  Joan followed
his eyes.  Mrs. Phillips had swallowed the smoke and was giggling and
spluttering by turns.  The yellow ostrich feather had worked itself loose
and was rocking to and fro as if in a fit of laughter of its own.

He pushed back his chair and rose.  "Shall we join the others?" he said.

He moved so that he was between her and the other room, his back to the
open doors.  "You think I ought to?" he said.

"Yes," she answered firmly, as if she were giving a command.  But he read
pity also in her eyes.

"Well, have you two settled the affairs of the kingdom?  Is it all
decided?" asked Airlie.

"Yes," he answered, laughing.  "We are going to say to the people, 'Eat,
drink and be wise.'"

He rearranged his wife's feather and smoothed her tumbled hair.  She
looked up at him and smiled.

Joan set herself to make McKean talk, and after a time succeeded.  They
had a mutual friend, a raw-boned youth she had met at Cambridge.  He was
engaged to McKean's sister.  His eyes lighted up when he spoke of his
sister Jenny.  The Little Mother, he called her.

"She's the most beautiful body in all the world," he said.  "Though
merely seeing her you mightn't know it."

He saw her "home"; and went on up the stairs to his own floor.

Joan stood for a while in front of the glass before undressing; but felt
less satisfied with herself.  She replaced the star in its case, and took
off the regal-looking dress with the golden girdle and laid it carelessly
aside.  She seemed to be growing smaller.

In her white night dress, with her hair in two long plaits, she looked at
herself once more.  She seemed to be no one of any importance at all:
just a long little girl going to bed.  With no one to kiss her good
night.

She blew out the candle and climbed into the big bed, feeling very
lonesome as she used to when a child.  It had not troubled her until to-
night.  Suddenly she sat up again.  She needn't be back in London before
Tuesday evening, and to-day was only Friday.  She would run down home and
burst in upon her father.  He would be so pleased to see her.

She would make him put his arms around her.




CHAPTER VIII


She reached home in the evening.  She thought to find her father in his
study.  But they told her that, now, he usually sat alone in the great
drawing-room.  She opened the door softly.  The room was dark save for a
flicker of firelight; she could see nothing.  Nor was there any sound.

"Dad," she cried, "are you here?"

He rose slowly from a high-backed chair beside the fire.

"It is you," he said.  He seemed a little dazed.

She ran to him and, seizing his listless arms, put them round her.

"Give me a hug, Dad," she commanded.  "A real hug."

He held her to him for what seemed a long while.  There was strength in
his arms, in spite of the bowed shoulders and white hair.

"I was afraid you had forgotten how to do it," she laughed, when at last
he released her.  "Do you know, you haven't hugged me, Dad, since I was
five years old.  That's nineteen years ago.  You do love me, don't you?"

"Yes," he answered.  "I have always loved you."

She would not let him light the gas.  "I have dined--in the train," she
explained.  "Let us talk by the firelight."

She forced him gently back into his chair, and seated herself upon the
floor between his knees.  "What were you thinking of when I came in?" she
asked.  "You weren't asleep, were you?"

"No," he answered.  "Not that sort of sleep."  She could not see his
face.  But she guessed his meaning.

"Am I very like her?" she asked.

"Yes," he answered.  "Marvellously like her as she used to be: except for
just one thing.  Perhaps that will come to you later.  I thought, for the
moment, as you stood there by the door . . . "  He did not finish the
sentence.

"Tell me about her," she said.  "I never knew she had been an actress."

He did not ask her how she had learnt it.  "She gave it up when we were
married," he said.  "The people she would have to live among would have
looked askance at her if they had known.  There seemed no reason why they
should."

"How did it all happen?" she persisted.  "Was it very beautiful, in the
beginning?"  She wished she had not added that last.  The words had
slipped from her before she knew.

"Very beautiful," he answered, "in the beginning."

"It was my fault," he went on, "that it was not beautiful all through.  I
ought to have let her take up her work again, as she wished to, when she
found what giving it up meant to her.  The world was narrower then than
it is now; and I listened to the world.  I thought it another voice."

"It's difficult to tell, isn't it?" she said.  "I wonder how one can?"

He did not answer; and they sat for a time in silence.

"Did you ever see her act?" asked Joan.

"Every evening for about six months," he answered.  A little flame shot
up and showed a smile upon his face.

"I owe to her all the charity and tenderness I know.  She taught it to me
in those months.  I might have learned more if I had let her go on
teaching.  It was the only way she knew."

Joan watched her as gradually she shaped herself out of the shadows: the
poor, thin, fretful lady of the ever restless hands, with her bursts of
jealous passion, her long moods of sullen indifference: all her music
turned to waste.

"How did she come to fall in love with you?" asked Joan.  "I don't mean
to be uncomplimentary, Dad."  She laughed, taking his hand in hers and
stroking it.  "You must have been ridiculously handsome, when you were
young.  And you must always have been strong and brave and clever.  I can
see such a lot of women falling in love with you.  But not the artistic
woman."

"It wasn't so incongruous at the time," he answered.  "My father had sent
me out to America to superintend a contract.  It was the first time I had
ever been away from home, though I was nearly thirty; and all my pent-up
youth rushed out of me at once.  It was a harum-scarum fellow, mad with
the joy of life, that made love to her; not the man who went out, nor the
man who came back.  It was at San Francisco that I met her.  She was
touring the Western States; and I let everything go to the wind and
followed her.  It seemed to me that Heaven had opened up to me.  I fought
a duel in Colorado with a man who had insulted her.  The law didn't run
there in those days; and three of his hired gunmen, as they called them,
held us up that night in the train and gave her the alternative of going
back with them and kissing him or seeing me dead at her feet.  I didn't
give her time to answer, nor for them to finish.  It seemed a fine death
anyhow, that.  And I'd have faced Hell itself for the chance of fighting
for her.  Though she told me afterwards that if I'd died she'd have gone
back with them, and killed him."

Joan did not speak for a time.  She could see him grave--a little
pompous, in his Sunday black, his footsteps creaking down the
stone-flagged aisle, the silver-edged collecting bag held stiffly in his
hand.

"Couldn't you have saved a bit, Daddy?" she asked, "of all that wealth of
youth--just enough to live on?"

"I might," he answered, "if I had known the value of it.  I found a cable
waiting for me in New York.  My father had been dead a month; and I had
to return immediately."

"And so you married her and took her drum away from her," said Joan.  "Oh,
the thing God gives to some of us," she explained, "to make a little
noise with, and set the people marching."

The little flame died out.  She could feel his body trembling.

"But you still loved her, didn't you, Dad?" she asked.  "I was very
little at the time, but I can just remember.  You seemed so happy
together.  Till her illness came."

"It was more than love," he answered.  "It was idolatry.  God punished me
for it.  He was a hard God, my God."

She raised herself, putting her hands upon his shoulders so that her face
was very close to his.  "What has become of Him, Dad?" she said.  She
spoke in a cold voice, as one does of a false friend.

"I do not know," he answered her.  "I don't seem to care."

"He must be somewhere," she said: "the living God of love and hope: the
God that Christ believed in."

"They were His last words, too," he answered: "'My God, my God, why hast
Thou forsaken me?'"

"No, not His last," said Joan: "'Lo, I am with you always, even unto the
end of the world.'  Love was Christ's God.  He will help us to find Him."

Their arms were about one another.  Joan felt that a new need had been
born in her: the need of loving and of being loved.  It was good to lay
her head upon his breast and know that he was glad of her coming.

He asked her questions about herself.  But she could see that he was
tired; so she told him it was too important a matter to start upon so
late.  She would talk about herself to-morrow.  It would be Sunday.

"Do you still go to the chapel?" she asked him a little hesitatingly.

"Yes," he answered.  "One lives by habit."

"It is the only Temple I know," he continued after a moment.  "Perhaps
God, one day, will find me there."

He rose and lit the gas, and a letter on the mantelpiece caught his eye.

"Have you heard from Arthur?" he asked, suddenly turning to her.

"No.  Not since about a month," she answered.  "Why?"

"He will be pleased to find you here, waiting for him," he said with a
smile, handing her the letter.  "He will be here some time to-morrow."

Arthur Allway was her cousin, the son of a Nonconformist Minister.  Her
father had taken him into the works and for the last three years he had
been in Egypt, helping in the laying of a tramway line.  He was in love
with her: at least so they all told her; and his letters were certainly
somewhat committal.  Joan replied to them--when she did not forget to do
so--in a studiously sisterly vein; and always reproved him for
unnecessary extravagance whenever he sent her a present.  The letter
announced his arrival at Southampton.  He would stop at Birmingham, where
his parents lived, for a couple of days, and be in Liverpool on Sunday
evening, so as to be able to get straight to business on Monday morning.
Joan handed back the letter.  It contained nothing else.

"It only came an hour or two ago," her father explained.  "If he wrote to
you by the same post, you may have left before it arrived."

"So long as he doesn't think that I came down specially to see him, I
don't mind," said Joan.

They both laughed.  "He's a good lad," said her father.

They kissed good night, and Joan went up to her own room.  She found it
just as she had left it.  A bunch of roses stood upon the dressing-table.
Her father would never let anyone cut his roses but himself.

Young Allway arrived just as Joan and her father had sat down to supper.
A place had been laid for him.  He flushed with pleasure at seeing her;
but was not surprised.

"I called at your diggings," he said.  "I had to go through London.  They
told me you had started.  It is good of you."

"No, it isn't," said Joan.  "I came down to see Dad.  I didn't know you
were back."  She spoke with some asperity; and his face fell.

"How are you?" she added, holding out her hand.  "You've grown quite good-
looking.  I like your moustache."  And he flushed again with pleasure.

He had a sweet, almost girlish face, with delicate skin that the Egyptian
sun had deepened into ruddiness; with soft, dreamy eyes and golden hair.
He looked lithe and agile rather than strong.  He was shy at first, but
once set going, talked freely, and was interesting.

His work had taken him into the Desert, far from the beaten tracks.  He
described the life of the people, very little different from what it must
have been in Noah's time.  For months he had been the only white man
there, and had lived among them.  What had struck him was how little he
had missed all the paraphernalia of civilization, once he had got over
the first shock.  He had learnt their sports and games; wrestled and swum
and hunted with them.  Provided one was a little hungry and tired with
toil, a stew of goat's flesh with sweet cakes and fruits, washed down
with wine out of a sheep's skin, made a feast; and after, there was music
and singing and dancing, or the travelling story-teller would gather
round him his rapt audience.  Paris had only robbed women of their grace
and dignity.  He preferred the young girls in their costume of the
fourteenth dynasty.  Progress, he thought, had tended only to complicate
life and render it less enjoyable.  All the essentials of happiness--love,
courtship, marriage, the home, children, friendship, social intercourse,
and play, were independent of it; had always been there for the asking.

Joan thought his mistake lay in regarding man's happiness as more
important to him than his self-development.  It was not what we got out
of civilization but what we put into it that was our gain.  Its luxuries
and ostentations were, in themselves, perhaps bad for us.  But the
pursuit of them was good.  It called forth thought and effort, sharpened