turned the page on a dark
preface, and have before them still the long bright volume of life.
The girl has her arm linked in the man's, but as they walk she breaks
often away from him, to dart into copses, to gather flowers, or to peer
over the brink where the gulls wheel and oyster-catchers pipe among the
shingle. She is no more the tragic muse of the past week, but a
laughing child again, full of snatches of song, her eyes bright with
expectation. They talk of the new world which lies before them, and her
voice is happy. Then her brows contract, and, as she flings herself
down on a patch of young heather, her air is thoughtful.

"I have been back among fairy tales," she says. "I do not quite
understand, Alesha. Those gallant little boys! They are youth, and
youth is always full of strangeness. Mr. Heritage! He is youth, too,
and poetry, perhaps, and a soldier's tradition. I think I know him....
But what about Dickson? He is the PETIT BOURGEOIS, the EPICIER, the
class which the world ridicules. He is unbelievable. The others with
good fortune I might find elsewhere--in Russia perhaps. But not
Dickson."

"No," is the answer. "You will not find him in Russia. He is what
they call the middle-class, which we who were foolish used to laugh at.
But he is the stuff which above all others makes a great people. He
will endure when aristocracies crack and proletariats crumble. In our
own land we have never known him, but till we create him our land will
not be a nation."

Half a mile away on the edge of the Laver glen Dickson and Heritage are
together, Dickson placidly smoking on a tree-stump and Heritage walking
excitedly about and cutting with his stick at the bracken. Sundry
bandages and strips of sticking plaster still adorn the Poet, but his
clothes have been tidied up by Mrs. Morran, and he has recovered
something of his old precision of garb. The eyes of both are fixed on
the two figures on the cliff-top. Dickson feels acutely uneasy. It is
the first time that he has been alone with Heritage since the arrival
of Alexis shivered the Poet's dream. He looks to see a tragic grief;
to his amazement he beholds something very like exultation.

"The trouble with you, Dogson," says Heritage, "is that you're a bit of
an anarchist. All you false romantics are. You don't see the
extraordinary beauty of the conventions which time has consecrated. You
always want novelty, you know, and the novel is usually the ug