tle and estates
he would, without doubt, have become a denizen of Harley Street, and
made his way without difficulty into the front ranks of his profession.
With the passing away of all necessity for work came a curious era of
half-doubtful dilettanteism, a time during which he read hugely,
traveled a good deal, and finally returned to England with the seeds of
a great unrest sown in his mind.

Mysticism and psychology, which he had dabbled in at first
half-contemptuously, had become serious studies to him. Dimly he felt
the fascination of that unending effort which from the days of the
Chaldeans had swayed the lives of a long succession of the world's
masters, the effort to establish some sort of communication, however
faint, however speculative, between the world of known things and the
world beyond. At times he found himself moved to the most profound
self-ridicule. He would ask himself how it was possible for a man of
science seriously to investigate problems whose very foundation must be
an assumption. He looked at his walls lined with books, and he smiled
grimly as he realized how little, after all, they had taught him. The
sum of all that he had learned from them amounted to nothing. Yet he
remembered what Spencer Trowse, a fellow student, had said to him. A
sudden flush had lightened his thin cheeks, pallid with the ceaseless
energy of their student life.

"After all, Powers, I think that we are wasting our days," he exclaimed.
"Those ancients saw no farther behind the veil than we. I am tired of
all this musty lore, this delving among cobwebs."

"What then?" Powers had asked. "Modern scholarship has taught us little
enough."

"Let us have done with all scholarship," Trowse answered. "It is the
laws of humanity we want to understand. Let us study them at first hand.
Let us go down among the people."

"What can this rabble teach us?" Powers had asked himself, full of the
intellectual contempt of the young student for the whole pleasure-loving
world. "Whether their wings be soiled or pure, they are only
butterflies!"

Trowse smiled grimly.

"They are the living evidences," he said, "of laws which are worth
studying. If we would understand humanity we must not start by despising
any part of it."

With characteristic impetuosity the two young men had thrown themselves
heart and soul into their new enterprise. They haunted police courts and
places of entertainment. They lived for a while in a great industr