“Grandmama has good taste in tutors,” was all that she said while the thoughts rolled over.

CHAPTER IV.

RECOGNITION

Our applicant for the post of secretary entered the street of Lord Ormont’s London house, to present himself to his boyhood’s hero by appointment.

He was to see, perhaps to serve, the great soldier.  Things had come to this; and he thought it singular.  But for the previous introduction to Lady Charlotte, he would have thought it passing wonderful.  He ascribed it to the whirligig.

The young man was not yet of an age to gather knowledge of himself and of life from his present experience of the fact, that passionate devotion to an object strikes a vein through circumstances, as a travelling run of flame darts the seeming haphazard zigzags to catch at the dry of dead wood amid the damp; and when passion has become quiescent in the admirer, there is often the unsubsided first impulsion carrying it on.  He will almost sorely embrace his idol with one or other of the senses.

Weyburn still read the world as it came to him, by bite, marvelling at this and that, after the fashion of most of us.  He had not deserted his adolescent’s hero, or fallen upon analysis of a past season.  But he was now a young man, stoutly and cognizantly on the climb, with a good aim overhead, axed green youth’s enthusiasms a step below his heels:  one of the lovers of life, beautiful to behold, when we spy into them; generally their aspect is an enlivenment, whatever may be the carving of their features.  For the sake of holy unity, this lover of life, whose gaze was to the front in hungry animation, held fast to his young dreams, perceiving a soul of meaning in them, though the fire might have gone out; and he confessed to a past pursuit of delusions.  Young men of this kind will have, for the like reason, a similar rational sentiment on behalf of our world’s historic forward march, while admitting that history has to be taken from far backward if we would gain assurance of man’s advance.  It nerves an admonished ambition.

He was ushered into a London house’s library, looking over a niggard enclosure of gravel and dull grass, against a wall where ivy dribbled.  An armchair was beside the fireplace.  To right and left of it a floreate company of books in high cases paraded shoulder to shoulder, without a gap; grenadiers on the line.  Weyburn read the titles on their scarlet-and-blue facings.  They were approved English classics; honoured veterans, who have emerged from the conflict with contemporary opinion, stamped excellent, or have been pushed by the roar of contemporaneous applauses to wear the leather-and-gilt uniform of our Immortals, until a more qualmish posterity disgorges them.  The books had costly bindings.  Lord Ormont’s treatment of Literature appeared to resemble Lady Charlotte’s, in being reverential