“Yes,” weighed Lewisham, “I suppose he is.”

“Now a fool fails of happiness because of his insufficient mind, he miscalculates, he stumbles and hobbles, some cant or claptrap whirls him away; he gets passion out of a book and a wife out of the stews, or he quarrels on a petty score; threats frighten him, vanity beguiles him, he fails by blindness.  But the knave who is not a fool fails against the light.  Many knaves are fools also—­most are—­but some are not.  I know—­I am a knave but no fool.  The essence of your knave is that he lacks the will, the motive capacity to seek his own greater good.  The knave abhors persistence.  Strait is the way and narrow the gate; the knave cannot keep to it and the fool cannot find it.”

Lewisham lost something of what Chaffery was saying by reason of a rap outside.  He rose, but Ethel was before him.  He concealed his anxiety as well as he could; and was relieved when he heard the front door close again and her footsteps pass into the bedroom by the passage door.  He reverted to Chaffery.

“Has it ever occurred to you,” asked Chaffery, apparently apropos of nothing, “that intellectual conviction is no motive at all?  Any more than a railway map will run a train a mile.”

“Eh?” said Lewisham.  “Map—­run a train a mile—­of course, yes.  No, it won’t.”

“That is precisely my case,” said Chaffery.  “That is the case of your pure knave everywhere.  We are not fools—­because we know.  But yonder runs the highway, windy, hard, and austere, a sort of dry happiness that will endure; and here is the pleasant by-way—­lush, my boy, lush, as the poets have it, and with its certain man-trap among the flowers ...”

Ethel returned through the folding doors.  She glanced at Lewisham, remained standing for awhile, sat down in the basket chair as if to resume some domestic needlework that lay upon the table, then rose and went back into the bedroom.

Chaffery proceeded to expatiate on the transitory nature of passion and all glorious and acute experiences.  Whole passages of that discourse Lewisham did not hear, so intent was he upon those roses.  Why had Ethel gone back into the bedroom?  Was it possible—?  Presently she returned, but she sat down so that he could not see her face.

“If there is one thing to set against the wholesome life it is adventure,” Chaffery was saying.  “But let every adventurer pray for an early death, for with adventure come wounds, and with wounds come sickness, and—­except in romances—­sickness affects the nervous system.  Your nerve goes.  Where are you then, my boy?”

“Ssh! what’s that?” said Lewisham.

It was a rap at the house door.  Heedless of the flow of golden wisdom, he went out at once and admitted a gentleman friend of Madam Gadow, who passed along the passage and vanished down the staircase.  When he returned Chaffery was standing to go.

“I could have talked with you longer,” he said, “but you have something on your mind, I see.  I will not worry you by guessing what.  Some day you will remember ...”  He said no more, but laid his hand on Lewisham’s shoulder.