ford, 'some very noble words;
remarkable for so young a man as you must be. You have lived, Ashburn,
it's easy to see that!'

'Oh, well,' said Mark, 'I--I've knocked about, you know.'

'Ah, and you've knocked something into you, too, which is more to the
purpose. I'd like to know now when you found time to construct your
theories of life and conduct.'

Mark began to find this embarrassing; he said he had hit upon them at
odd times ('_very_ odd times,' he could not help remembering), and
shifted his ground a little uneasily, but he was held fast by the
buttonhole. 'They're remarkably sound and striking, I must say that,
and your story is interesting, too. I found myself looking at the
end, sir, ha, ha! to see what became of your characters. Ah, I _knew_
there was something I wanted to ask you. There's a heading you've got
for one of your chapters, a quotation from some Latin author, which I
can't place to my satisfaction; I mean that one beginning "_Non terret
principes_."'

'Oh, _that_ one?' repeated Mark blankly.

'Yes, it reads to me like later Latin; where did you take it from? One
of the Fathers?'

'One of them, I forget which,' said Mark quickly, wishing he had cut
the quotations out.

'That _aegritudo_, now, "aegritudo superveniens," you know--how do you
understand that?'

Mark had never troubled himself to understand it at all, so he stared
at his interrogator in rather a lost way.

'I mean, do you take it as of the mind or body (that's what made me
fancy it must be later Latin). And then there's the _correxit_?'

Mark admitted that there was the 'correxit.' 'It's mind,' he said
quickly. 'Oh, decidedly the mind, _not_ body, and--er--I think that's
my 'bus passing. I'll say good-bye;' and he escaped with a weary
conviction that he must devote yet more study to the detested
'Illusion.'

This is only a sample of the petty vexations to which he had exposed
himself. He had taken over a business which he did not understand, and
naturally found the technicalities troublesome, for though, as has
been seen, his own tendencies were literary, he had not soared so high
as a philosophical romance, while his scholarship, more brilliant than
profound, was not always equal to the 'unseen passages' from
out-of-the-way authors with which Holroyd had embellished his
chapters.

But a little more care made him feel easier on this score, and then
there were many compensations; for one unexpected piece of good
fortune