“I’m awfully sorry, but I can’t,” he said.  “It means giving up everything I’ve aimed at for years.  In one way and another I’ve had a roughish time, but I always had that one hope before me, to get qualified so that I might travel; and now, when I wake in the morning, my bones simply ache to get off, I don’t mind where particularly, but just away, to places I’ve never been to.”

Now the goal seemed very near.  He would have finished his appointment at St. Luke’s by the middle of the following year, and then he would go to Spain; he could afford to spend several months there, rambling up and down the land which stood to him for romance; after that he would get a ship and go to the East.  Life was before him and time of no account.  He could wander, for years if he chose, in unfrequented places, amid strange peoples, where life was led in strange ways.  He did not know what he sought or what his journeys would bring him; but he had a feeling that he would learn something new about life and gain some clue to the mystery that he had solved only to find more mysterious.  And even if he found nothing he would allay the unrest which gnawed at his heart.  But Doctor South was showing him a great kindness, and it seemed ungrateful to refuse his offer for no adequate reason; so in his shy way, trying to appear as matter of fact as possible, he made some attempt to explain why it was so important to him to carry out the plans he had cherished so passionately.

Doctor South listened quietly, and a gentle look came into his shrewd old eyes.  It seemed to Philip an added kindness that he did not press him to accept his offer.  Benevolence is often very peremptory.  He appeared to look upon Philip’s reasons as sound.  Dropping the subject, he began to talk of his own youth; he had been in the Royal Navy, and it was his long connection with the sea that, when he retired, had made him settle at Farnley.  He told Philip of old days in the Pacific and of wild adventures in China.  He had taken part in an expedition against the head-hunters of Borneo and had known Samoa when it was still an independent state.  He had touched at coral islands.  Philip listened to him entranced.  Little by little he told Philip about himself.  Doctor South was a widower, his wife had died thirty years before, and his daughter had married a farmer in Rhodesia; he had quarrelled with him, and she had not come to England for ten years.  It was just as if he had never had wife or child.  He was very lonely.  His gruffness was little more than a protection which he wore to hide a complete disillusionment; and to Philip it seemed tragic to see him just waiting for death, not impatiently, but rather with loathing for it, hating old age and unable to resign himself to its limitations, and yet with the feeling that death was the only solution of the bitterness of his life.  Philip crossed his path, and the natural affection which long separation from his daughter had killed—­she had taken