the tutelage of policemen, listening to anyone
who would lift a voice to speak to them. London, beating on all borders,
hemmed them in; England outside seemed hardly to contain for them a
wider space. Lorne, with his soul full of free airs and forest
depths, never failed to respond to a note in the Park that left him
heavy-hearted, longing for an automatic distributing system for the
Empire. When he saw them bring their spirit-lamps and kettles and
sit down in little companies on four square yards of turf, under
the blackened branches, in the roar of the traffic, he went back to
Bloomsbury to pack his trunk, glad that it was not his lot to live with
that enduring spectacle.

They were all glad, every one of them, to turn their faces to the West
again. The unready conception of things, the political concentration
upon parish affairs, the cumbrous social machinery, oppressed them
with its dull anachronism in a marching world; the problems of sluggish
overpopulation clouded their eager outlook. These conditions might have
been their inheritance. Perhaps Lorne Murchison was the only one who
thanked Heaven consciously that it was not so; but there was no man
among them whose pulse did not mark a heart rejoiced as he paced the
deck of the Allan liner the first morning out of Liverpool, because he
had leave to refuse them. None dreamed of staying, of "settling," though
such a course was practicable to any of them except Lorne. They were
all rich enough to take the advantages that money brings in England, the
comfort, the importance, the state; they had only to add their wealth
to the sumptuous side of the dramatic contrast. I doubt whether the idea
even presented itself. It is the American who takes up his appreciative
residence in England. He comes as a foreigner, observant, amused, having
disclaimed responsibility for a hundred years. His detachment is as
complete as it would be in Italy, with the added pleasure of easy
comprehension. But homecomers from Greater Britain have never been
cut off, still feel their uneasy share in all that is, and draw a long
breath of relief as they turn again to their life in the lands where
they found wider scope and different opportunities, and that new quality
in the blood which made them different men.

The deputation had accomplished a good deal; less, Cruickshank said,
than he had hoped, but more than he had expected. They had obtained
the promise of concessions for Atlantic services, b