Not for years had he felt so well in body and mind as during his walk home.  There, there was the thought for which he had been obscurely groping!  What were volumes of metaphysics and of sociology to the man who had heard this one little truth whispered from the upturned mould?  Henceforth he knew why he was living, and how it behooved him to live.  Let theories and poesies follow if they would:  for him, the prime duty was that nearest to him, to strive his best that the little corner of earth which he called his own should yield food for man.  At this moment there lay upon his table letters informing him of the unsatisfactory state of his Kentish farm; the tenant was doing badly in every sense of the word, and would willingly escape from his lease if opportunity were given.  Very well; the man should go.

“I will live there myself.  I will get some practical man to live with me, until I understand farming.  For profit, I don’t care; all will be well if I keep myself alive and furnish food for a certain number of other mortals.  This is the work ready to my hand.  No preaching, no theorising, no trying to prove that the earth should be parcelled out and every man turn delver.  I will cultivate this ground because it is mine, and because no other way offers of living as a man should—­taking some part, however humble, in the eternal strife with nature.”

The idea had before now suggested itself to him, but not as the result of a living conviction.  If he had then turned to farming, it would have been as an experiment in life; more or less vague reflections on the needs of the time would have seemed to justify him.  Now he was indifferent to all “questions” save that prime solicitude of the human race, how to hold its own against the hostile forces everywhere leagued against it.  Life was a perpetual struggle, and, let dreamers say what they might, could never be anything else; he, for one, perceived no right that he had to claim exemption from the doom of labour.  Had he felt an impulse to any other kind of work, well and good, he would have turned to it; but nothing whatever called to him with imperative voice save this task of tilling his own acres.  It might not always satisfy him; he took no vow of one sole vocation; he had no desire to let his mind rust whilst his hands grew horny.  Enough that for the present he had an aim which he saw as a reality.

On his return home, he found a London letter awaiting him.  It was with a nervous shrug that he saw the writing of Mrs. Toplady.  Addressing him at his club, she invited him to dine on an evening a fortnight hence, if he chanced to be in town.

“You heard, of course,” she added, “of the defeat of Mr. Lashmar at Hollingford.  It seems to have been inevitable.”

So Lashmar had been defeated.  The Hollingford election interested Dymchurch so little that he had never inquired as to its result; in truth, he had forgotten all about it.