“Nothing can ever alter it; it’s in the wheels of the universe,” went on Inglewood, in a low voice:  “some men are weak and some strong, and the only thing we can do is to know that we are weak.  I have been in love lots of times, but I could not do anything, for I remembered my own fickleness.  I have formed opinions, but I haven’t the cheek to push them, because I’ve so often changed them.  That’s the upshot, old fellow.  We can’t trust ourselves—­ and we can’t help it.”

Michael had risen to his feet, and stood poised in a perilous position at the end of the roof, like some dark statue hung above its gable.  Behind him, huge clouds of an almost impossible purple turned slowly topsy-turvy in the silent anarchy of heaven.  Their gyration made the dark figure seem yet dizzier.

“Let us...” he said, and was suddenly silent.

“Let us what?” asked Arthur Inglewood, rising equally quick though somewhat more cautiously, for his friend seemed to find some difficulty in speech.

“Let us go and do some of these things we can’t do,” said Michael.

At the same moment there burst out of the trapdoor below them the cockatoo hair and flushed face of Innocent Smith, calling to them that they must come down as the “concert” was in full swing, and Mr. Moses Gould was about to recite “Young Lochinvar.”

As they dropped into Innocent’s attic they nearly tumbled over its entertaining impedimenta again.  Inglewood, staring at the littered floor, thought instinctively of the littered floor of a nursery.  He was therefore the more moved, and even shocked, when his eye fell on a large well-polished American revolver.

“Hullo!” he cried, stepping back from the steely glitter as men step back from a serpent; “are you afraid of burglars? or when and why do you deal death out of that machine gun?”

“Oh, that!” said Smith, throwing it a single glance; “I deal life out of that,” and he went bounding down the stairs.

Chapter III

The Banner of Beacon

All next day at Beacon House there was a crazy sense that it was everybody’s birthday.  It is the fashion to talk of institutions as cold and cramping things.  The truth is that when people are in exceptionally high spirits, really wild with freedom and invention, they always must, and they always do, create institutions.  When men are weary they fall into anarchy; but while they are gay and vigorous they invariably make rules.  This, which is true of all the churches and republics of history, is also true of the most trivial parlour game or the most unsophisticated meadow romp.  We are never free until some institution frees us; and liberty cannot exist till it is declared by authority.  Even the wild authority of the harlequin Smith was still authority, because it produced everywhere a crop of crazy regulations and conditions.  He filled every one with his own half-lunatic life; but it was not