ared not a rap for
flogging. He rose in open rebellion and pushed away his stool.

"Not I!" he said. "The design is false, and I will not put into my work
what is not as it should be!"

He turned and marched out of the room--leaving Master Tobias dumb with
astonishment and rage--surly and savage and very bitter, with his hand
against every man because he thought that every man's hand was against
him.

And then, quite suddenly, there swept over him the fierce, insistent
longing for change which wrestles with every man at some time or other
in his life; the hot desire to fling himself out of the rut into which
that life inevitably must settle, to encounter anything, good or bad, so
long as it brought a change. And because he was still too young to see
that this is the very one thing which may not be; the one thing of which
Fate says: "Come and go, and plan as ye will, but remember that I hold
the leading-strings; for my name men call Circumstance, and my law is
that man shall do not what he will, but what he must,"--because as yet
he could not see this, he left Thorney that day for Londinium, saying no
word of his grievance to any man, with his bundle tied to a stick upon
his shoulder.

It was on the road to Londinium that he overtook one journeying in the
same direction, who kept pace with him persistently, let him go fast or
slow. This was a venerable man, with a long beard of white, and wise,
all-seeing eyes that smiled and smiled beneath the penthouse of his
brows. Nicanor came to hate him vindictively, with no reason at all, as
he hated all the world just then.

Nicanor stopped at evening by the roadside, and sat down to eat the food
he had brought with him. And this ancient man stopped also, and sat upon
a stone near by, and watched him. Nicanor, with meat and black bread in
his hands, glanced up, ready to scowl, and met the old man's eyes,
smiling at him. It was so long since any man had done other than revile
him--since one's own mood will reflect itself like an image in clear
water upon the minds of those around one--that Nicanor was surprised
into smiling back, uncertainly, it is true, but still smiling. Then it
was as though a bit of that outer crust of moroseness melted, and left
something of his old boyish shyness in its place. Without stopping in
the least to think why he did it, he broke the bread and meat into two
portions, and held out one, in silence, awkwardly, as a child who does
not know whether