act to the last
degree. She watched him disappear with fascinated eyes. After all, he
represented great things; behind him was a whole national code; the
machinery of which he was so small a part drove the wheels of life or
death. She turned away from the window with a shrug of the shoulders.
Humming a tune, she threw herself back in her chair, and began the
leisurely perusal of her letters.

CHAPTER XX

LIKE A TRAPPED ANIMAL

Macheson in those days felt himself rapidly growing older. An
immeasurable gap seemed to lie between him and the eager young apostle
who had plunged so light-heartedly into the stress of life. All that
wonderful enthusiasm, that undaunted courage with which he had faced
coldness and ridicule in the earlier days of his self-chosen vocation
seemed to have left him. Some way, somehow, he seemed to have suffered
shipwreck! There was poison in his system! Fight against it as he
might--and he did fight--there were moments when memory turned the life
which he had taken up so solemnly into the maddest, most fantastic fairy
story. At such times his blood ran riot, the sweetness of a strange,
unknown world seemed to be calling to him across the forbidden borders.
Inaction wearied him horribly--and, after all, it was inaction which
Holderness had recommended as the best means of re-establishing himself
in a saner and more normal attitude towards life!

"Look round a bit, old chap," he advised, "and think. Don't do anything
in a hurry. You're young, shockingly young for any effective work. You
can't teach before you understand. Life isn't such a sink of iniquity
as you young prigs at Oxford professed to find it. See the best of it
and the worst. You'll be able to put your finger on the weak spots quick
enough."

But the process of looking around wearied Macheson excessively--or was
it something else which had crept into his blood to his immense
unsettlement? There were several philanthropic schemes started by
himself and his college friends in full swing now, in or about London.
To each of them he paid some attention, studying its workings, listening
to the enthusiastic outpourings of his quondam friends and doing his
best to catch at least some spark of their interest. But it was all very
unsatisfactory. Deep down in his heart he felt the insistent craving for
some fiercer excitement, some mode of life which should make larger and
deeper demands upon his emotional temperament. A heroic war woul