The Doctor had not spoken for a moment.  It might be that he was careless of the poetic lights with which Mr. Howth tenderly decorated his old faith, or it might be that even he, with the terrible intentness of a real life-purpose in his brain, was touched by the picture of the far old chivalry, dead long ago.  The master’s voice grew low and lingering now.  It was a labor of love, this.  Oh, it is so easy to go back out of the broil of dust and meanness and barter into the clear shadow of that old life where love and bravery stand eternal verities,—­never to be bought and sold in that dusty town yonder!  To go back?  To dream back, rather.  To drag out of our own hearts, as the hungry old master did, whatever is truest and highest there, and clothe it with name and deed in the dim days of chivalry.  Make a poem of it,—­so much easier than to make a life!

Knowles shuffled uneasily, watching the girl keenly, to know how the picture touched her.  Was, then, she thought, this grand dead Past so shallow to him?  These knights, pure, unstained, searching until death for the Holy Greal, could he understand the life-long agony, the triumph of their conflict over Self?  These women, content to live in solitude forever because they once had loved, could any man understand that?  Or the dead queen, dead that the man she loved might be free and happy,—­why, this was life,—­this death!  But did pain, and martyrdom, and victory lie back in the days of Galahad and Arthur alone?  The homely face grew stiller than before, looking out into the dun sweep of moorland,—­cold, unrevealing.  It baffled the man that looked at it.  He shuffled, chewed tobacco vehemently, tilted his chair on two legs, broke out in a thunder-gust at last.

“Dead days for dead men!  The world hears a bugle-call to-day more noble than any of your piping troubadours.  We have something better to fight for than a vacant tomb.”

The old man drew himself up haughtily.

“I know what you would say,—­Liberty for the low and vile.  It is a good word.  That was a better which they hid in their hearts in the old time,—­Honor!”

Honor!  I think, Calvinist though he was, that word was his religion.  Men have had worse.  Perhaps the Doctor thought this; for he rose abruptly, and, leaning on the old man’s chair, said, gently,—­

“It is better, even here.  Yet you poison this child’s mind.  You make her despise To-Day; make honor live for her now.”

“It does not,” the schoolmaster said, bitterly.  “The world’s a failure.  All the great old dreams are dead.  Your own phantom, your Republic, your experiment to prove that all men are born free and equal,—­what is it to-day?”

Knowles lifted his head, looking out into the brown twilight.  Some word of pregnant meaning flashed in his eye and trembled on his lip; but he kept it back.  His face glowed, though, and the glow and strength gave to the huge misshapen features a grand repose.