led to me was that the higher the one, the lower the
other. It seems as if nature must balance her work; the nearer the
leaves to heaven, the deeper the roots striking down into the darkness. I
knew that his passion for this woman made no change in his truer love.
The one was a spiritual, the other a mere animal passion. The memory of
incidents that had puzzled me came back to enlighten me. I remembered
how often on nights when I had sat up late, working, I had heard his
steps pass my door, heavy and uncertain; how once in a dingy quarter of
London, I had met one who had strangely resembled him. I had followed
him to speak, but the man's bleared eyes had stared angrily at me, and I
had turned away, calling myself a fool for my mistake. But as I looked
at the face beside me now, I understood.

And then there rose up before my eyes the face I knew better, the eager
noble face that to merely look upon had been good. We had reached a
small, evil-smelling street, leading from Leicester Square towards
Holborn. I caught him by the shoulders and turned him round with his
back against some church railings. I forget what I said. We are strange
mixtures. I thought of the shy, backward boy I had coached and bullied
at old Fauerberg's, of the laughing handsome lad I had watched grow into
manhood. The very restaurant we had most frequented in his old Oxford
days--where we had poured out our souls to one another, was in this very
street where we were standing. For the moment I felt towards him as
perhaps his mother might have felt; I wanted to scold him and to cry with
him; to shake him and to put my arms about him. I pleaded with him, and
urged him, and called him every name I could put my tongue to. It must
have seemed an odd conversation. A passing policeman, making a not
unnatural mistake, turned his bull's-eye upon us, and advised us sternly
to go home. We laughed, and with that laugh Cyril came back to his own
self, and we walked on to Staple Inn more soberly. He promised me to go
away by the very first train the next morning, and to travel for some
four or five months, and I undertook to make all the necessary
explanations for him.

We both felt better for our talk, and when I wished him good-night at his
door, it was the real Cyril Harjohn whose hand I gripped--the real Cyril,
because the best that is in a man is his real self. If there be any
future for man beyond this world, it is the good that is in him t