new has come. Don't turn it all up again.'

Then I played the heathen and raged, as Graeme would have said, till
Craig smiled a little wearily and said--

'You exhaust yourself, old chap. Have a pipe, do'; and after a pause he
added in his own way, 'What would you have? The path lies straight from
my feet. Should I quit it? I could not so disappoint you--and all of
them.'

And I knew he was thinking of Graeme and the lads in the mountains he
had taught to be true men. It did not help my rage, but it checked my
speech; so I smoked in silence till he was moved to say--

'And after all, you know, old chap, there are great compensations for
all losses; but for the loss of a good conscience towards God, what can
make up?'

But, all the same, I hoped for some better result from his visit to
Britain. It seemed to me that something must turn up to change such an
unbearable situation.

The year passed, however, and when I looked into Craig's face again I
knew that nothing had been changed, and that he had come back to take up
again his life alone, more resolutely hopeful than ever.

But the year had left its mark upon him too. He was a broader and deeper
man. He had been living and thinking with men of larger ideas and
richer culture, and he was far too quick in sympathy with life to remain
untouched by his surroundings. He was more tolerant of opinions other
than his own, but more unrelenting in his fidelity to conscience and
more impatient of half-heartedness and self-indulgence. He was full of
reverence for the great scholars and the great leaders of men he had
come to know.

'Great, noble fellows they are, and extraordinarily modest,' he
said--'that is, the really great are modest. There are plenty of the
other sort, neither great nor modest. And the books to be read! I am
quite hopeless about my reading. It gave me a queer sensation to
shake hands with a man who had written a great book. To hear him make
commonplace remarks, to witness a faltering in knowledge--one expects
these men to know everything--and to experience respectful kindness at
his hands!'

'What of the younger men?' I asked.

'Bright, keen, generous fellows. In things theoretical, omniscient; but
in things practical, quite helpless. They toss about great ideas as
the miners lumps of coal. They can call them by their book names easily
enough, but I often wondered whether they could put them into English.
Some of them I coveted for the mountains.