with this lecturing campaign, that you don't sleep, and that she is more
unhappy about you than she has been for months. Why not give it up now,
rest, and begin again in the winter?"

Hallin smiled a little as he sat with the tips of his fingers lightly
joined in front of him.

"I doubt whether I shall live through the winter," he said quietly.

Raeburn started. Hallin in general spoke of his health, when he allowed
it to be mentioned at all, in the most cheerful terms.

"Why you should behave as though you _wished_ to make such a prophecy
true I can't conceive!" he said in impatient pain.

Hallin offered no immediate answer, and Raeburn, who was standing in
front of him, leaning against the wood-work of the open window, looked
unhappily at the face and form of his friend. In youth that face had
possessed a Greek serenity and blitheness, dependent perhaps on its
clear aquiline feature, the steady transparent eyes--_coeli lucida
templa_--the fresh fairness of the complexion, and the boyish brow under
its arch of pale brown hair. And to stronger men there had always been
something peculiarly winning in the fragile grace of figure and
movements, suggesting, as they did, sad and perpetual compromise between
the spirit's eagerness and the body's weakness.

"Don't make yourself unhappy, my dear boy," said Hallin at last, putting
up a thin hand and touching his friend--"I _shall_ give up soon.
Moreover, it will give me up. Workmen want to do something else with
their evenings in July than spend them in listening to stuffy lectures.
I shall go to the Lakes. But there are a few engagements still ahead,
and--I confess I am more restless than I used to be. The night cometh
when no man can work."

They fell into a certain amount of discursive talk--of the political
situation, working-class opinion, and the rest. Raeburn had been alive
now for some time to a curious change of balance in his friend's mind.
Hallin's buoyant youth had concerned itself almost entirely with
positive crusades and enthusiasms. Of late he seemed rather to have
passed into a period of negations, of strong opposition to certain
current _isms_ and faiths; and the happy boyish tone of earlier years
had become the "stormy note of men contention-tost," which belongs,
indeed, as truly to such a character as the joy of young ideals.

He had always been to some extent divided from Raeburn and others of his
early friends by his passionate democracy--his belie