el her heavy, greasy hand
about his ears. He was free--free to read, free to sleep, free to talk,
free to drink in the beauty of the lazy hours. Vaguely he was conscious
that one of the wonders that would come would be his own expansion. He
would learn many things which he did not know, things that would fit
him for his high estate. He looked down upon the foreshortened figure
of Barney Bill, his cloth cap, his shoulders, his bare brown arms, a
patch of knee. To the boy, at that moment, he was less a man than an
instrument of Destiny guiding him, not knowing why, to the Promised
Land.

At last on the quiet road Paul saw a bicyclist approaching them.
Mindful of Barney Bill's injunction, he withdrew his head. Presently he
lay down on the couch, and, soothed by the jogging of the van and the
pleasant creaking of the baskets, fell into the deep sleep of tired and
happy childhood.

CHAPTER IV

IT was a day of dust and blaze. Dust lay thick on the ground, it filled
the air, it silvered the lower branches of the wayside trees, it turned
the old brown horse into a dappled grey, it powdered the black hair of
Barney Bill and of Paul until they looked like vagabond millers. They
sat side by side on the footboard while the old horse jogged on,
whisking flies away with a scanty but persistent tail.

Paul, barefoot and barelegged, hatless, coatless, absorbed blaze and
dust with the animal content of a young lizard. A month's summer
wandering had baked him to gipsy brown. A month's sufficient food and
happiness had filled gaunt hollows in his face and covered all too
visible ribs with flesh. Since his flight from Bludston his life had
been one sensuous trance. His hungry young soul had been gorged with
beauty--the beauty of fields and trees and rolling country, of still,
quivering moons and starlit nights, of exultant freedom, of
never-failing human sympathy. He had a confused memory of everything.
They had passed through many towns as similar to Bludston as one
factory chimney to another, and had plied their trade in many a mean
street, so much the counterpart of Budge Street that he had watched a
certain window or door with involuntary trepidation, until he realized
that it was not Budge Street, that he was a happy alien to its squalor,
that he was a butterfly, a thing of woods and hedgerows fluttering for
an inconsequent moment in the gloom. He came among them, none knew
whence he was going, none knew whither. He was consc