it; for the gifted, the freemen who can enter into the
genius, who possess the liberty, of the place; that it has a reproach
in it for the outsider, which comes home to him.

Here again then as he passes through the world, so delightfully to
others, they tell him, as if weighing him, his very self, against his
merely scholastic capacity and effects, that he would "do for the
army"; which he is now wholly glad to hear, for from first to last,
through all his successes there, the army had still been scholar
Stokes' choice, and he had no difficulty, as the reader sees, in
keeping Uthwart also faithful to first intentions. Their names were
already entered for commissions; but the war breaking out afresh,
information reaches them suddenly one morning that they may join their
regiment forthwith. Bidding good-bye therefore, gladly, hastily, they
set out with as little delay as possible for Flanders; and passing the
old school by their nearest road thither, stay for an hour, find an
excuse for coming into the hall in uniform, with which it must be
confessed they seem thoroughly satisfied--Uthwart quite perversely at
ease in the stiff make of his scarlet jacket with black facings--and so
pass onward on their way to Dover, Dunkirk, they scarcely know whither
finally, among the featureless villages, the long monotonous lines of
the windmills, the poplars, blurred with cold fogs, but marking the
[230] roads through the snow which covers the endless plain, till they
come in sight at last of the army in motion, like machines moving--how
little it looked on that endless plain!--pass on their rapid way to
fame, to unpurchased promotion, as a matter of course to responsibility
also, till, their fortune turning upon them, they miscarry in the
latter fatally. They joined in fact a distinguished regiment in a
gallant army, immediately after a victory in those Flemish regions;
shared its encouragement as fully as if they had had a share in its
perils; the high character of the young officers consolidating itself
easily, pleasantly for them, till the hour of an act of thoughtless
bravery, almost the sole irregular or undisciplined act of Uthwart's
life, he still following his senior--criminal however to the military
conscience, under the actual circumstances, and in an enemy's country.
The faulty thing was done, certainly, with a scrupulous, a
characteristic completeness on their part; and with their prize
actually in hand, an old weathe