on, their security of
obligation, of obedience to authority, which at the time had seemed
irksome enough and upon release from which he had so recently
congratulated himself.

Love of home, of England, of his own people--of the Archdeacon, in even
his most full-voiced and moralizing mood--love of things tested,
accustomed and friendly, touched him to the quick. Suddenly he asked
himself to what end was he leaving all these and going forth to encounter
untried conditions, an unknown Nature, a moral and social order equally
unknown? Looking at the peaceful, ethereally lovely landscape, set in
such close proximity and notable contrast to the unrest of that historic
highway of the nations, the Channel sea, he felt small and lonely,
childishly diffident and weak. All the established safety and comfort of
home, all the thoughtless irresponsible delights of vanished boyhood,
pulled at his heart-strings. He wanted, wanted wildly, desperately, not
to go forward but to go back.

Mind and body being healthy, however, the phase was a passing one, and
his emotion, though sincere and poignant, of brief duration. For young
blood--happily for the human story, which otherwise would read altogether
too sad--defies forebodings, gaily embraces risks; and, true soldier of
fortune, marches out to meet whatever fate the battlefield of manhood may
hold for it, a song in its mouth and a rose behind its ear.

Tom Verity speedily came to a steadier mind, pouring honest contempt upon
his momentary lapse from self-confidence. He was ashamed of it. It
amounted to being silly, simply silly. He couldn't understand, couldn't
account for it. What possessed him to get a regular scare like this? It
was too absurd for words. Sentiment?--Yes, by all means a reasonable
amount of it, well in hand and thus capable of translation--if the fancy
took you--into nicely turned elegiac verse; but a scare, a scare pure and
simple, wasn't to be tolerated! And he got up, standing astraddle to
brace himself against the swinging of the train, while he stretched,
settling himself in his clothes--pulled down the fronts of his waistcoat,
buttoned the jacket of his light check suit; and, taking off his
wide-awake, smoothed his soft, slightly curly russet-coloured hair with
his hand. These adjustments, and the assurance they induced that his
personal appearance was all which it should be, completed his moral
restoration. He stepped down on to the platform, into the serene li