And twisted round on his heel and walked out; making his way out to the streets and facing the journey to Clarges Street afoot.  For to be absolutely without envy of any sort is not given to anything born of woman; and the sight of this man’s happiness, the knowledge of this man’s reward, brought upon him a bitter recollection of how far he still was from his own.

Would he ever get that reward? he wondered.  Would he ever be nearer to it than he was to-night?  It hurt—­yes, it hurt horribly, sometimes, this stone-cold silence, this walking always in shadowed paths without a ray of light, without the certainty of arriving anywhere, though he plod onward for a lifetime—­and the old feeling of savage resentment, the old sense of self-pity—­the surest thing on God’s earth to blaze a trail for the oncoming of the worst that is in a man—­bit at the soul of him and touched him on the raw again.

He knew what that boded; and he also knew the antidote.

“Dollops, they broke into our holiday—­they did us out of a part of it, didn’t they, old chap?” he said, when he reached home at last and found the boy anxiously awaiting him.  “Well, we’ll have a day for every hour they deprived us of, a whole day, bonny boy.  Pack up again and we’ll be off to the land as God made it, and where God’s things still live; and we’ll have a fortnight of it—­a whole blessed fortnight, my boy, with the river and the fields and the flowers and the dreams that hide in trees.”

Dollops made no reply.  He simply bolted for the kit-bag and began to pack at once.  And the morrow, when it came, found these two—­the servant who was still a boy, and the master who had discovered the way back to boyhood’s secrets—­forging up the shining river and seeking the Land of Nightingales again.

CHAPTER XIX

The spring had blossomed itself out and the summer had bloomed itself in.  The holiday up the river was a thing of the past; the dreams of the Dreamer had given place to those sterner phases of life which must be coped with by the Realist; and Cleek was “back in harness” again.

A half-dozen more or less important cases had occupied his time since his return; but, although he had carried these to a successful issue and had again been lauded to the skies by the daily papers, the one word of praise from the one quarter whence he so earnestly desired to hear was never forthcoming.

Of Ailsa Lorne he had heard not a solitary thing, either directly or indirectly, since that day when he had put her into the taxicab at Charing Cross Station and saw her safely on her way to Hampstead before he went his own.

True, her silence was, as he had agreed, an admission that all was well with her and that she had secured the position in question; true it was also that it was not for her to take the initiative and break that silence; that he fully realised how impossible, for a girl born and bred as she had been, to voluntarily open up a correspondence with a man who was as yet little more than a mere acquaintance; but, all the same, he chafed under that silence and spent many a wakeful hour at night brooding on it.