rupulous as he was,
could not but hesitate. In striving to save his young friend from one
form of ruin, was it written that he should plunge him into another
more irretrievable, more sweeping, more lifelong?

"I am thinking he might give us trouble," he replied deliberately. "What
if he sickened of the whole business, and kicked just when we wanted to
pull together the most? No, no, Hazon. If we take him at all, we must
send him back as I say. It's all very well for us two, but it doesn't
seem quite the thing to run a fresh-hearted youngster, with all his life
before him, and bursting with hopes and ideals, into a grim business of
this kind. But taking him, or leaving him, rests with you entirely."

"Leave it that way, then. I'll think it over and see if it pans out
any," said Hazon, leisurely lighting a fresh pipe. "But, Stanninghame,
what's this?" he added, with a sudden, keen glance out of his piercing
eyes. "You are letting yourself go with regard to this matter--showing
feeling. That won't do, you know. You've got to have no sample of that
sort of goods about you, no more than can be put into a block of
granite. Aren't you in training yet?"

"Well, I think so; or, at any rate, shall be long before it is wanted
seriously."

No more was said on the subject then.

As the preparations progressed, and the time for the start drew near, it
seemed to Laurence Stanninghame that more and more was the old life a
mere dream, a dream of the past. Sometimes in his sleep he would be back
in it, would see the dinginess of the ramshackle semi-detached, would
hear the vulgar sounds of the vulgar suburban street; and he would turn
uneasily in his dreams, with a depressing consciousness of dust and
discord, and a blank wall as of the hopelessness of life drawn across
his path. Feeling? Pooh! Who would miss him out of the traditional
"charm" of the family circle? A new toy, costing an extra shilling or
so, would quite knock out all and any recollection of himself. There
were times when in his dreams he had even returned to the domestic ark,
and in the result a day of welcome and comparative peace, then discord
and jangling strife as before, and the ever weighing-down, depressing,
crushing consciousness of squalid penury for the rest of his natural
life. From such visions he had awakened, awakened with a start of
exultant gratulation, to find the glow of the African sun streaming into
the room; every nerve tingling with a conscio