ingsbury had met him--in Lower Charleswood post office,
and by noon of the following day, all "the county" knew that he was "a
charming recluse with the soul of a poet."

And this was the man with whom Paul Mario paced along the green aisles
toward the point where they crossed that Pilgrim's Way which linking
town to village, village to hamlet, lies upon the hills like a rosary on
a nun's bosom.

"My car is waiting below," said Jules Thessaly. "You will probably
prefer to drive back?"

Paul assented. He was breathing deeply of the sweet humid air, pungent
with a thousand fresh scents and the intoxicating fragrance of
rain-kissed loam. The sound of greedily drinking plant things arose from
the hillside. Beyond the purple heath hung the midnight curtain,
embroidered fitfully with silver, and he removed his hat that the cool
breeze might touch him. Hatless he was magnificently picturesque;
Antinoeus spared to maturity; the nature-worshipper within him stirred to
quickness by magic perfumes arising from the breast of Mother Earth, he
resembled that wonderful statue of the Bithynian which shows him as
Dionysus the Twice-born, son of the raincloud, lover of the verdure.

"The world," said Jules Thessaly, "is waiting for you."

Through his abstract Orphic dreams the words reached Paul's mind; and
they were oddly familiar. Who had spoken them--now, and once before? He
awoke, and remembered. Don had said that the world awaited him. He
turned and glanced at his companion. Jules Thessaly was regarding him
fixedly.

"You spoke," said Paul. "Pardon my abstraction; but what did you say?"

"I said that when Nature endows a man at once with the genius of Dante
and the appearance of a Greek god, that man holds the world in the
hollow of his hand. He was born with a purpose. He _dares_ not seek to
evade his destiny."

Paul met the glance of the golden, prominent eyes, and it held him
enthralled. "I do not seek to evade it," he replied slowly. "I accept
it; but I am afraid."

A low-pitched powerful French car stood at the foot of the slope, the
chauffeur in his seat and a footman standing beside the open door.
Poised ethereally betwixt solid earth and some sphere remote peopled by
Greek nature-myths, Paul found himself beside Jules Thessaly, and being
borne swiftly, strongly upward to the hills. At the gap beyond the
toll-gate, where one may view a prospect unique in all the county, the
car stopped, perhaps in obedience to a su