From that he had been saved, and he gave thanks without pretence, for with the freedom of his body was enwrapped the freedom of his soul.  Yet he was still a young man when Nicky was nearing “double figures”—­only in the early thirties.  To him the years that had passed since Nicky’s birth were so different in quality from all that had gone before that it was small wonder they seemed to him another life and he himself another person.  Nicky had been the dominating human factor; the public life of the times, as it affected his own corner in particular, the chief interest which had kept him hard at work, too busy for the dreams of his unsatisfied youth.  He had altered, hardened, sharpened, become more of a man of the world, thought himself contented, and in action and practical affairs drowned mental speculation and emotion.

This was the Ishmael of the late ’seventies, a being altered indeed, but not more so than the England of that period was from the England of the ’fifties and ’sixties.  That she had grown, improved, set her house in better order, it would have been futile to deny—­the improvements were of the visible kind, patent to all men.  That Mr. Disraeli’s new policy of Imperialism was to be a great and splendid thing there were few men among the Liberals wise enough to foresee, and Ishmael was not yet amongst them.  That he himself had grown, developed, become a useful member of society, no one who knew him would have denied, but whether his growth had been altogether towards the light was another question.  The old Parson was a wise and a patient man who had gone too far along life’s road to take any stage in it as necessarily final, and he watched and bided the time perhaps more prayerfully, certainly more silently, than of yore.  Ishmael never failed in consideration, in affection, but there had grown a barrier that was not entirely made of a difference in politics.  He knew it even if Ishmael, the child of his heart, seemed not to care enough one way or the other to be aware of it.

One day, a sunlit blowy day of spring, when the cloud-shadows drew swiftly over the dappled hills and the young corn was showing its first fine flames of green, Ishmael received a letter.  Long after it had come he sat with it in his hand, reading and re-reading it.  A tinge of excitement, a heady something he had long not felt, because it was purely personal, went through and through him as he read.  The letter was from Killigrew, from whom he had heard nothing for several years, and it held news to awake all the old memories in a flood.  The letter began by asking for news of Ishmael, and went on with a brief dismissal of the writer’s own life during the past years.  It had been the “usual thing”—­no small measure of success, friendships, women, play and work.  What mattered was that Killigrew had suddenly taken it into his head he must come down again to Cloom.  He was coming and at once.  He gave a few characteristic reasons.