childhood had given them and custom had preserved. The dusty,
untidy shop at home had shrunk to less than half its original
dimensions. Armstrong seemed changed more than anything or anybody
else. He looked suddenly small and old and gray. He was not much over
five-and-sixty, but he had always seemed old to Paul, even from the
earliest recollections of infancy. But his age had been the age of
dignity and authority, and now it was age without disguise, white-haired
and withered, and bowed in uncomplaining patience.

But Paul felt that there was no such change anywhere as in himself. A
certain complacency had stolen across the horror which had shaken him
at the first contemplation of his own fall. He had made a step towards
manhood; he heard the talk of men--not the best, not the wisest, yet
neither the worst nor the most stupid--and he knew now how lightly they
valued that which he had once esteemed priceless. He had written in his
note-book:

'To forgive is godlike. Be as God unto thyself.'

He had made a step towards manhood. He had thought it a hideous,
irremediable plunge to ruin, and yet somehow he seemed to stand the
higher for it. The episode was to be hateful for ever in memory. But
it was to cloud life no longer--only to stand as a sign of warning,
a danger-signal. Surely the net is spread in vain in the sight of any
bird. The burned child dreads the fire. He did not as yet reckon that
man is a moral Salamander, and accommodates himself to all temperatures
of heat and asceticism. How should a raw lad of less than nineteen think
in such a fashion? But he knew what he had not known; he had passed
through the fire, and the smell of burning had left his raiment.

The Midland mother gave him a cold cheek to kiss when he went away, but
the Scottish father embraced him with a trembling arm.

'Ye'll be remembering Sir Walter's last words to Lockhart,' he said. 'Be
a good man, my dear.'

Paul pressed his smooth cheek against the soft white whiskers of his
father's face, and held his right hand hard. There was a lump in his
throat, and his good-bye had a husk in it. He went back to the society
of men who had never thought manly chastity a virtue or the unchastity
of men a crime. He went back armed in steel, and the armour lasted a
full fortnight in its perfection. Then here and there a rivet came out,
and by-and-by the whole suit fell to pieces.

'Id is gurious,' said Darco, 'that all the vunniest sdories in the vo