drag through the mire?'

Dudley did not. He sharpened his mouth.

'Buried, you said, sir?--a widower?'

'I've no positive information; we shall hear when he: comes back,' Victor
replied hurriedly. 'He got a drenching of all the damns in the British
service from his. Generalissimo one day at a Review, for a trooper's
negligence-button or stock missing, or something; and off goes Dartrey to
his hut, and breaks his sword, and sends in his resignation. Good soldier
lost. And I can't complain; he has been a right-hand man to me over in
Africa. But a man ought to have some control of his temper, especially a
soldier.'

Dudley put emphasis into his acquiescence.

'Worse than that temper of Dartrey's, he can't forgive an injury. He
bears a grudge against his country. You've heard Colney Durance abuse old
England. It's three parts factitious-literary exercise. It 's milk beside
the contempt of Dartrey's shrug. He thinks we're a dead people, if a
people; "subsisting on our fat," as Colney says.'

'I am not of opinion that we show it,' observed Dudley.

'We don't,' Victor agreed. He disrelished his companion's mincing tone of
a monumental security, and yearned for Dartrey or Simeon or Colney to be
at his elbow rather than this most commendable of orderly citizens, who
little imagined the treacherous revolt from him in the bosom of the
gentleman cordially signifying full agreement. But Dudley was not gifted
to read behind words and looks.

They were in the Park of the dwindling press of carriages, and here was
this young Dudley saying, quite commendably: 'It's a pity we seem to have
no means of keeping our parks select.'

Victor flung Simeon Fenellan at him in thought. He remembered a fable of
Fenellan's, about a Society of the Blest, and the salt it was to them to
discover an intruder from below, and the consequent accelerated measure
in their hymning.

'Have you seen anything offensive to you?' he asked.

'One sees notorious persons.'

Dudley spoke aloof from them--'out of his cold attics,' Fenellan would
have said.

Victor approved: with the deadened feeling common to us when first in sad
earnest we consent to take life as it is.

He perceived, too, the comicality of his having to resign himself to the
fatherly embrace of goodness.

Lakelands had him fast, and this young Dudley was the kernel of
Lakelands. If he had only been intellectually a little flexible in his
morality! But no; he wore it cap a pie, like