ds--indeed, it was almost a luxury. Think
you, does he still play the flute--an instrument none too grave, Luke?"

But, to this, Luke Claridge exclaimed impatiently and hastened on; and
the little wizened Elder chuckled to himself all the way to the house of
John Fairley. None in Hamley took such pride in David as did these two
old men, who had loved him from a child, but had discreetly hidden their
favour, save to each other. Many times they had met and prayed together
in the weeks when his life was in notorious danger in the Soudan.

As David walked through the streets of Heddington making for the open
country, he was conscious of a new feeling regarding the place. It
was familiar, but in a new sense. Its grimy, narrow streets, unlovely
houses, with shut windows, summer though it was, and no softening
influences anywhere, save here and there a box of sickly geraniums in
the windows, all struck his mind in a way they had never done before.
A mile away were the green fields, the woods, the roadsides gay with
flowers and shrubs-loveliness was but over the wall, as it were; yet
here the barrack-like houses, the grey, harsh streets, seemed like
prison walls, and the people in them prisoners who, with every legal
right to call themselves free, were as much captives as the criminal on
some small island in a dangerous sea. Escape--where? Into the gulf of no
work and degradation?

They never lifted their eyes above the day's labour. They were scarce
conscious of anything beyond. What were their pleasures? They had
imitations of pleasures. To them a funeral or a wedding, a riot or a
vociferous band, a dog-fight or a strike, were alike in this, that they
quickened feelings which carried them out of themselves, gave them a
sense of intoxication.

Intoxication? David remembered the far-off day of his own wild rebellion
in Hamley. From that day forward he had better realised that in the
hearts of so many of the human race there was a passion to forget
themselves; to blot out, if for a moment only, the troubles of life and
time; or, by creating a false air of exaltation, to rise above
them. Once in the desert, when men were dying round him of fever and
dysentery, he had been obliged, exhausted and ill, scarce able to
drag himself from his bed, to resort to an opiate to allay his own
sufferings, that he might minister to others. He remembered how, in the
atmosphere it had created--an intoxication, a soothing exhilaration and
perv