he raw again.

He knew what that boded; and he also knew the antidote.

"Dollops, they broke into our holiday--they did us out of a part of it,
didn't they, old chap?" he said, when he reached home at last and found
the boy anxiously awaiting him. "Well, we'll have a day for every hour
they deprived us of, a whole day, bonny boy. Pack up again and we'll be
off to the land as God made it, and where God's things still live; and
we'll have a fortnight of it--a whole blessed fortnight, my boy, with
the river and the fields and the flowers and the dreams that hide in
trees."

Dollops made no reply. He simply bolted for the kit-bag and began to
pack at once. And the morrow, when it came, found these two--the servant
who was still a boy, and the master who had discovered the way back to
boyhood's secrets--forging up the shining river and seeking the Land of
Nightingales again.

CHAPTER XIX

The spring had blossomed itself out and the summer had bloomed itself
in. The holiday up the river was a thing of the past; the dreams of the
Dreamer had given place to those sterner phases of life which must be
coped with by the Realist; and Cleek was "back in harness" again.

A half-dozen more or less important cases had occupied his time since
his return; but, although he had carried these to a successful issue and
had again been lauded to the skies by the daily papers, the one word of
praise from the one quarter whence he so earnestly desired to hear was
never forthcoming.

Of Ailsa Lorne he had heard not a solitary thing, either directly or
indirectly, since that day when he had put her into the taxicab at
Charing Cross Station and saw her safely on her way to Hampstead before
he went his own.

True, her silence was, as he had agreed, an admission that all was well
with her and that she had secured the position in question; true it was
also that it was not for her to take the initiative and break that
silence; that he fully realised how impossible, for a girl born and bred
as she had been, to voluntarily open up a correspondence with a man who
was as yet little more than a mere acquaintance; but, all the same, he
chafed under that silence and spent many a wakeful hour at night
brooding on it.

In his heart he knew that if any advance was to be made, that advance
was the man's duty, not the woman's; but the fear that she would think
he was thrusting himself upon her, the dread that even yet the white
soul of her coul