n seems as though the winged thing came back a lagging and reluctant
rebel against its fate and the chain which draws it back a prisoner to
its toil.

It had seemed so often to Mount Dunstan--oftener than not. Youth
should not know such awakening, he was well aware; but he had known it
sometimes even when he had been a child, and since his return from his
ill-starred struggle in America, the dull and reluctant facing of the
day had become a habit. Yet on the morning after his talk with his
friend--the curious, uplifted, unpractical talk which had seemed to
hypnotise him--he knew when he opened his eyes to the light that he had
awakened as a man should awake--with an unreasoning sense of pleasure
in the life and health of his own body, as he stretched mighty limbs,
strong after the night's rest, and feeling that there was work to be
done. It was all unreasoning--there was no more to be done than on those
other days which he had wakened to with bitterness, because they seemed
useless and empty of any worth--but this morning the mere light of the
sun was of use, the rustle of the small breeze in the leaves, the
soft floating past of the white clouds, the mere fact that the great
blind-faced, stately house was his own, that he could tramp far over
lands which were his heritage, unfed though they might be, and that the
very rustics who would pass him in the lanes were, so to speak, his own
people: that he had name, life, even the common thing of hunger for his
morning food--it was all of use.

An alluring picture--of a certain deep, clear bathing pool in the park
rose before him. It had not called to him for many a day, and now he saw
its dark blueness gleam between flags and green rushes in its encircling
thickness of shrubs and trees.

He sprang from his bed, and in a few minutes was striding across the
grass of the park, his towels over his arm, his head thrown back as he
drank in the freshness of the morning-scented air. It was scented with
dew and grass and the breath of waking trees and growing things; early
twitters and thrills were to be heard here and there, insisting on
morning joyfulness; rabbits frisked about among the fine-grassed
hummocks of their warren and, as he passed, scuttled back into their
holes, with a whisking of short white tails, at which he laughed with
friendly amusement. Cropping stags lifted their antlered heads, and
fawns with dappled sides and immense lustrous eyes gazed at him without
actu