“Of course I shall be a doctor.  Last holidays I went a lot to Guy’s where I have a chum, and I saw a lot of dissecting.  Do you know that when they dissect ’em they stick a sort of squirt in their chests and dwaw off all the blood?  I’ve got a theowy that I mean to put into pwactice some day.  It seemed to me such a shame that all that good blood should go to waste like that, and it occurred to me what a splendid thing it would be if, instead of doing nothing with murdewers but kill ’em, they dwew off their blood while it was still warm and pumped it into famous men, gweat generals and people like that, who were getting old and feeble.  Most murdewers are thundewing stout fellows, you know.”

“How horrid you are, Carminow!” cried Hilaria.  “I shouldn’t think a great man would at all like having a murderer’s blood in his veins.  I’m sure my darling Lord Palmerston wouldn’t.”

“Oh, I don’t say it’s possible at pwesent,” replied Carminow placidly, “but when surgeons know their business it will be.  One must look at these things from a purely utilitawian standpoint.”

Ishmael said nothing.  He was lying on his back again, folded arms beneath his head, staring at the glory of the west that had passed from liquid fire to the feather-softness of the sun’s aftermath.  The presence of the others hardly impinged on his consciousness; vaguely he heard their voices coming from a long way off.  One of his moods of exaltation, that only the very young know, was upon him—­a state which amounts to intoxication and to recapture any glow of which older people have to be artificially stimulated.  That is really the great dividing-line—­when the sparkle, the lightness, the sharpened sense which stimulates brain and tongue and feeling, ceases to respond without a flick of help from the right touch of alcohol.  That intoxication of sheer living was upon Ishmael now, as it had been on that long-ago evening when the Neck had been cried, as it had a few times since, with music, or a windy sun, or a bathe in rough sea, or some sudden phrase in a book.  A something glamorous in the light, the low accents of Hilaria’s voice and the stirring quality of what she read, the reaction, had he but known it, from the shock of suspicion occasioned by what she had told him, the cumulative effect of the exalted thoughts of the past weeks, all these things, added to his own rising powers and urgent youth, welled within him and mounted to his brain.  He felt tingling with power as he lay there, apparently lax; it seemed to him he could hear the blood leaping in his veins and the beating of his pulses all over his body, could hear the faintest sound of calling lamb or far-off owl, could catch, with ears refined to a demigod’s, the ineffably quiet rubbing of the millions of grass-blades, as though he could almost hear the evening falling....  From afar came the babble of the others as to what they might think they were going to be; for himself he could be anything, scale any heights, beat triumphantly