"with his forty thousand a year and
all the rest of it. Such a race to run and yet so badly handicapped!"

He stooped down, examined the horse, found the mark of the bullet.

"Contradictory beings, though, these dear women," he went on. "So
fanciful and delicate, so sensitive you're afraid to lay a finger on
them. So unselfish, too, some of them, they seem too good for this old
rough and tumble of a world. And yet touch 'em home, and they'll show
an unscrupulous savagery of which we coarse brutes of men should be
more than half ashamed. God Almighty made a little more than He
bargained for when He made woman. She must have surprised Him pretty
shrewdly, one would think, now and then since the days of the apple and
the snake."

He moved away up the carriage drive, following Timothy, the sweating,
straining mare, and swinging gig. The carrion crow flapped back, with a
croak, and dropped on the horse's skull again. Hearing that bodeful
sound the doctor paused a moment, knocking the ashes out of his pipe,
and looking round at the bird at its ugly work, set as foreground to
that pure glory of the sunrise, and the vast noble landscape, misty
valley, dewy grassland, far ranging hillside crowned with wood.

"The old story," he muttered, "always repeating itself. And it strikes
one as rather a wasteful, clumsy contrivance, at times. Life forever
feeding on death--death forever breeding life."

Thus ended the Clown, own brother to Touchstone, of merry name and
mournful memory, paying the penalty of wholly involuntary
transgressions. From which ending another era dated at Brockhurst, the
most notable events of which it is the purpose of the ensuing pages
duly to set forth.

BOOK II

THE BREAKING OF DREAMS

CHAPTER I

RECORDING SOME ASPECTS OF A SMALL PILGRIM'S PROGRESS

It is an ill wind that blows nobody good, says the comfortable proverb.
Which would appear to be but another manner of declaring that the law
of compensation works permanently in human affairs. All quantities,
material and immaterial alike, are, of necessity, stable; therefore the
loss or defect of one participant must--indirectly, no doubt, yet very
surely--make for the gain of some other. As of old, so now, the blood
of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.

Julius March would, how gladly, have been among the martyrs! But the
lot fell otherwise. And--always admitting the harshness of the
limitations he had imposed on himself--the mar