riend
cut up into mincemeat, to provide herself with a needed _hors d'oeuvre_.

The tall man with the large head and the sharp, hawklike features,
sprang to his feet, and stood in the centre of the circle, aflush with
excitement.

"Ruts!" he repeated loudly. "What's the matter with us all is we're
_content_ with ruts! The thing which depresses me most at the beginning
of a year is to look back and realise the futility, the weakness, the
lack of progress. Great heavens! how much longer are we to be content
with ruts? Our youth is passing; in a short time it will have gone.
What have we done with our years? If we had been worthy the name, we
should have been done with ruts by now, they would have been paved over
with a smooth white path--the path to fortune! We should have walked
along it--our own road, a private road, forbidden to trespassers!"

A girl seated on an oak stool, in the shadow of the settle, raised her
quiet eyes, and watched him while he spoke. She was a slim, frail
thing, with hair parted in the centre and coiled flatly round her head.
She had taken the lowest seat, and had drawn it into the shadow, but now
she leaned forward, and the firelight searched her face. She was not
beautiful, she was not even pretty, she was small and insignificant, she
had made no effort to join in the conversation, and now, as John Malham
finished speaking, she shrank back into her corner, and became once more
a frail, shadowy shape; nevertheless, a beholder who had been vouchsafed
that one glimpse would have found himself turning once and again to that
shaded corner. He would have wanted to see that girl again; he would
have been conscious of a strange attraction towards her; he would have
asked himself curiously was it liking, or--hate?

The girl said nothing, but a man by her side punctuated the pause by a
laugh. He was a handsome fellow, with a bright, quizzical face and a
pair of audacious blue eyes.

"Oh, be hanged to fortune!" he cried loudly. "Be hanged to flagged
paths! They're the deepest ruts of all, if you could but see it.
What's wrong with us all is lethargy, slackness, the inability to move
of our own accord. What we get matters nothing, it's the _getting_ that
counts! Why, when I think of the whole wide world lying open, waiting,
beckoning, and of fellows like myself pacing every day of our lives in a
square mile cage in the City, I--I--" (he snapped his fingers in a
frenzy of impatience) "I w