vers know that
they can never throw away. And he had at once made of her, secretly, the
crown of his active romanticism--the lady waiting for the spoils of his
lance. Queer is the heart of a boy--strange its blending of reality and
idealism!

Climbing at a great pace, he reached Malvern Beacon just as it came
dawn, and stood there on the top, watching. He had not much aesthetic
sense; but he had enough to be impressed by the slow paling of the stars
over space that seemed infinite, so little were its dreamy confines
visible in the May morning haze, where the quivering crimson flags and
spears of sunrise were forging up in a march upon the sky. That vision
of the English land at dawn, wide and mysterious, hardly tallied with
Mr. Cuthcott's view of a future dedicate to Park and Garden City.
While Derek stood there gazing, the first lark soared up and began its
ecstatic praise. Save for that song, silence possessed all the driven
dark, right out to the Severn and the sea, and the fastnesses of the
Welsh hills, and the Wrekin, away in the north, a black point in the
gray. For a moment dark and light hovered and clung together. Would
victory wing back into night or on into day? Then, as a town is taken,
all was over in one overmastering rush, and light proclaimed. Derek
tightened his belt and took a bee-line down over the slippery grass. He
meant to reach the cottage of the laborer Tryst before that early bird
was away to the fields. He meditated as he went. Bob Tryst was all
right! If they only had a dozen or two like him! A dozen or two whom
they could trust, and who would trust each other and stand firm to form
the nucleus of a strike, which could be timed for hay harvest. What
slaves these laborers still were! If only they could be relied on, if
only they would stand together! Slavery! It WAS slavery; so long as
they could be turned out of their homes at will in this fashion. His
rebellion against the conditions of their lives, above all against the
manifold petty tyrannies that he knew they underwent, came from use of
his eyes and ears in daily contact with a class among whom he had been
more or less brought up. In sympathy with, and yet not of them, he had
the queer privilege of feeling their slights as if they were his own,
together with feelings of protection, and even of contempt that they
should let themselves be slighted. He was near enough to understand how
they must feel; not near enough to understand why, feeli