s face in
the pillows to stifle the sound of the tearing sobs which would come.

Alas! was there not only too real a meaning in that same ugly dream and
that shifting of personality? He understood, while his body quivered
with the anguish of it, that he had more in common with, and was
nearer, far nearer, to the maimed fighting-man of the old ballad, even
to the poor seagull robbed of its power of flight, than to all those
dear people whose business in life it seemed to pet and amuse him, and
to minister to his every want--to the handsome soldier uncle, whose
home-coming had so excited him, to Julius March, his indulgent tutor,
to Mademoiselle de Mirancourt, his delightful companion, to Clara, his
obedient playfellow, to brown-eyed Mary Cathcart, and even to his
lovely mother herself!

Thus did the bitter winds of truth, which blow forever across the
world, first touch Richard Calmady, cutting his poor boyish pride as
with a whip. But he was very young. And the young, mercifully, know no
such word as the inevitable; so that the wind of truth is ever tempered
for them--the first smart of it over--by the sunshine of ignorant and
unlimited hope.

CHAPTER III

CONCERNING THAT WHICH, THANK GOD, HAPPENS ALMOST EVERY DAY

The merry spring sky was clear, save in the south where a vast
perspective of dappled cloud lay against it, leaving winding rivers of
blue here and there, as does ribbed sand for the incoming tide. As the
white gate of the inner park--the gray unpainted palings ranging far
away to right and left--swung to behind them, and Henry the groom,
after a smart run, clambered up into his place again beside Camp on the
back seat of the double dog-cart, Richard's spirits rose. Straight
ahead stretched out the long vista of that peculiar glory of
Brockhurst, its avenue of Scotch firs. The trunks of them, rough-barked
and purple below, red, smooth and glistering above, shot up some thirty
odd feet--straight as the pillars of an ancient temple--before the
branches, sweeping outward and downward, met, making a whispering,
living canopy overhead, through which the sunshine fell in tremulous
shafts, upon the shining coats and gleaming harness of the horses, upon
Ormiston's clear-cut, bronzed face and upright figure, and upon the
even, straw-coloured gravel of the road. The said road is raised by
about three feet above the level of the land on either side. On the
left, the self-sown firs grow in close ranks. The