“Why you should behave as though you wished to make such a prophecy true I can’t conceive!” he said in impatient pain.

Hallin offered no immediate answer, and Raeburn, who was standing in front of him, leaning against the wood-work of the open window, looked unhappily at the face and form of his friend.  In youth that face had possessed a Greek serenity and blitheness, dependent perhaps on its clear aquiline feature, the steady transparent eyes—­coeli lucida templa—­the fresh fairness of the complexion, and the boyish brow under its arch of pale brown hair.  And to stronger men there had always been something peculiarly winning in the fragile grace of figure and movements, suggesting, as they did, sad and perpetual compromise between the spirit’s eagerness and the body’s weakness.

“Don’t make yourself unhappy, my dear boy,” said Hallin at last, putting up a thin hand and touching his friend—­“I shall give up soon.  Moreover, it will give me up.  Workmen want to do something else with their evenings in July than spend them in listening to stuffy lectures.  I shall go to the Lakes.  But there are a few engagements still ahead, and—­I confess I am more restless than I used to be.  The night cometh when no man can work.”

They fell into a certain amount of discursive talk—­of the political situation, working-class opinion, and the rest.  Raeburn had been alive now for some time to a curious change of balance in his friend’s mind.  Hallin’s buoyant youth had concerned itself almost entirely with positive crusades and enthusiasms.  Of late he seemed rather to have passed into a period of negations, of strong opposition to certain current isms and faiths; and the happy boyish tone of earlier years had become the “stormy note of men contention-tost,” which belongs, indeed, as truly to such a character as the joy of young ideals.

He had always been to some extent divided from Raeburn and others of his early friends by his passionate democracy—­his belief in, and trust of, the multitude.  For Hallin, the divine originating life was realised and manifested through the common humanity and its struggle, as a whole; for Raeburn, only in the best of it, morally or intellectually; the rest remaining an inscrutable problem, which did not, indeed, prevent faith, but hung upon it like a dead weight.  Such divisions, however, are among the common divisions of thinking men, and had never interfered with the friendship of these two in the least.

But the developing alienation between Hallin and hundreds of his working-men friends was of an infinitely keener and sorer kind.  Since he had begun his lecturing and propagandist life, Socialist ideas of all kinds had made great way in England.  And, on the whole, as the prevailing type of them grew stronger, Hallin’s sympathy with them had grown weaker and weaker.  Property to him meant “self-realisation”; and the abuse of property was no more just ground