eft the Embankment my intention
was to dispose of you in a doorway. But your story moves me strangely.
Could I be certain that you felt the sacredness of human life--as I
fear no boy can feel it--I should be tempted to ask you instead to
become one of us."

There was something in this remark about the sacredness of human life
that was not what Andrew expected, and his answer died unspoken.

"Youth," continued the stranger, "is enthusiasm, but not enthusiasm in
a straight line. We are impotent in directing it, like a boy with a
toy engine. How carefully the child sets it off, how soon it goes off
the rails! So youth is wrecked. The slightest obstacle sends it off
at a tangent. The vital force expended in a wrong direction does evil
instead of good. You know the story of Atalanta. It has always been
misread. She was the type not of woman but of youth, and Hippomenes
personated age. He was the slower runner, but he won the race; and yet
how beautiful, even where it run to riot, must enthusiasm be in such a
cause as ours!"

"If Atalanta had been Scotch," said Andrew "she would not have lost
that race for a pound of apples."

The stranger regarded him longingly, like a father only prevented by
state reasons from embracing his son.

He murmured something that Andrew hardly caught.

It sounded like:

"Atalanta would have been better dead."

"Your nationality is in your favour," he said, "and you have served
your apprenticeship to our calling. You have been tending towards us
ever since you came to London. You are an apple ripe for plucking, and
if you are not plucked now you will fall. I would fain take you by the
hand, and yet--"

"And yet?"

"And yet I hesitate. You seem a youth of the fairest promise; but how
often have I let these impulses deceive me! You talk of logic, but is
it more than talk? Man, they say, is a reasonable being. They are
wrong. He is only a being capable of reason."

"Try me," said Andrew.

The stranger resumed in a lower key:

"You do not understand what you ask as yet," he said; "still less what
we would ask in return of you."

"I have seen something to-day," said Andrew.

"But you are mistaken in its application. You think I followed the man
lately deceased as pertinaciously as you followed me. You are wrong.
When you met me in Chancery Lane I was in pursuit of a gentleman to
whose case I have devoted myself for several days. It has interested
me much. Ther