of the Unity of Life; this worshipper of an old God!  A God that stood, whip in hand, driving men to obedience.  A God that even now Courtier could conjure up staring at him from the walls of his nursery.  The God his own father had believed in.  A God of the Old Testament, knowing neither sympathy nor understanding.  Strange that He should be alive still; that there should still be thousands who worshipped Him.  Yet, not so very strange, if, as they said, man made God in his own image!  Here indeed was a curious mating of what the philosophers would call the will to Love, and the will to Power!

A soldier and his girl came and sat down on a bench close by.  They looked askance at this trim and upright figure with the fighting face; then, some subtle thing informing them that he was not of the disturbing breed called officer, they ceased to regard him, abandoning themselves to dumb and inexpressive felicity.  Arm in arm, touching each other, they seemed to Courtier very jolly, having that look of living entirely in the moment, which always especially appealed to one whose blood ran too fast to allow him to speculate much upon the future or brood much over the past.

A leaf from the bough above him, loosened by the sun’s kisses, dropped, and fell yellow at his feet.  The leaves were turning very soon?

It was characteristic of this man, who could be so hot over the lost causes of others, that, sitting there within half an hour of the final loss of his own cause, he could be so calm, so almost apathetic.  This apathy was partly due to the hopelessness, which Nature had long perceived, of trying to make him feel oppressed, but also to the habits of a man incurably accustomed to carrying his fortunes in his hand, and that hand open.  It did not seem real to him that he was actually going to suffer a defeat, to have to confess that he had hankered after this girl all these past weeks, and that to-morrow all would be wasted, and she as dead to him as if he had never seen her.  No, it was not exactly resignation, it was rather sheer lack of commercial instinct.  If only this had been the lost cause of another person.  How gallantly he would have rushed to the assault, and taken her by storm!  If only he himself could have been that other person, how easily, how passionately could he not have pleaded, letting forth from him all those words which had knocked at his teeth ever since he knew her, and which would have seemed so ridiculous and so unworthy, spoken on his own behalf.  Yes, for that other person he could have cut her out from under the guns of the enemy; he could have taken her, that fairest prize.  And in queer, cheery-looking apathy—­not far removed perhaps from despair—­he sat, watching the leaves turn over and fall, and now and then cutting with his stick at the air, where autumn was already riding.  And, if in imagination he saw himself carrying her away into the wilderness, and with his devotion making her happiness to grow, it was so far a flight, that a smile crept about his lips, and once or twice he snapped his jaws.