voice or feel her heavy, greasy hand about his ears.  He was free—­free to read, free to sleep, free to talk, free to drink in the beauty of the lazy hours.  Vaguely he was conscious that one of the wonders that would come would be his own expansion.  He would learn many things which he did not know, things that would fit him for his high estate.  He looked down upon the foreshortened figure of Barney Bill, his cloth cap, his shoulders, his bare brown arms, a patch of knee.  To the boy, at that moment, he was less a man than an instrument of Destiny guiding him, not knowing why, to the Promised Land.

At last on the quiet road Paul saw a bicyclist approaching them.  Mindful of Barney Bill’s injunction, he withdrew his head.  Presently he lay down on the couch, and, soothed by the jogging of the van and the pleasant creaking of the baskets, fell into the deep sleep of tired and happy childhood.

CHAPTER IV

It was a day of dust and blaze.  Dust lay thick on the ground, it filled the air, it silvered the lower branches of the wayside trees, it turned the old brown horse into a dappled grey, it powdered the black hair of Barney Bill and of Paul until they looked like vagabond millers.  They sat side by side on the footboard while the old horse jogged on, whisking flies away with a scanty but persistent tail.

Paul, barefoot and barelegged, hatless, coatless, absorbed blaze and dust with the animal content of a young lizard.  A month’s summer wandering had baked him to gipsy brown.  A month’s sufficient food and happiness had filled gaunt hollows in his face and covered all too visible ribs with flesh.  Since his flight from Bludston his life had been one sensuous trance.  His hungry young soul had been gorged with beauty—­the beauty of fields and trees and rolling country, of still, quivering moons and starlit nights, of exultant freedom, of never-failing human sympathy.  He had a confused memory of everything.  They had passed through many towns as similar to Bludston as one factory chimney to another, and had plied their trade in many a mean street, so much the counterpart of Budge Street that he had watched a certain window or door with involuntary trepidation, until he realized that it was not Budge Street, that he was a happy alien to its squalor, that he was a butterfly, a thing of woods and hedgerows fluttering for an inconsequent moment in the gloom.  He came among them, none knew whence he was going, none knew whither.  He was conscious of being a creature of mystery.  He pitied the fettered youth of these begrimed and joyless towns—­slaves, Men with Muckrakes (he had fished up ail old “Pilgrim’s Progress” from the lower depths of the van), who obstinately refused to raise their eyes to the glorious sun in heaven.  In his childish arrogance he would ask Barney Bill, “Why don’t they go away and leave it, like me?” And the wizened little man would reply, with the flicker of an eyelid unperceived by Paul, “Because they haven’t no ’igh-born parents waiting for ’em.  They’re born to their low estate, and they knows it.”  Which to Paul was a solution of peculiar comfort.