The morning awakening of a normal healthy human creature should be a joyous thing.  After the soul’s long hours of release from the burden of the body, its long hours spent—­one can only say in awe at the mystery of it, “away, away”—­in flight, perhaps, on broad, tireless wings, beating softly in fair, far skies, breathing pure life, to be brought back to renew the strength of each dawning day; after these hours of quiescence of limb and nerve and brain, the morning life returning should unseal for the body clear eyes of peace at least.  In time to come this will be so, when the soul’s wings are stronger, the body more attuned to infinite law and the race a greater power—­but as yet it often seems as though the winged thing came back a lagging and reluctant rebel against its fate and the chain which draws it back a prisoner to its toil.

It had seemed so often to Mount Dunstan—­oftener than not.  Youth should not know such awakening, he was well aware; but he had known it sometimes even when he had been a child, and since his return from his ill-starred struggle in America, the dull and reluctant facing of the day had become a habit.  Yet on the morning after his talk with his friend—­the curious, uplifted, unpractical talk which had seemed to hypnotise him—­he knew when he opened his eyes to the light that he had awakened as a man should awake—­with an unreasoning sense of pleasure in the life and health of his own body, as he stretched mighty limbs, strong after the night’s rest, and feeling that there was work to be done.  It was all unreasoning—­there was no more to be done than on those other days which he had wakened to with bitterness, because they seemed useless and empty of any worth—­but this morning the mere light of the sun was of use, the rustle of the small breeze in the leaves, the soft floating past of the white clouds, the mere fact that the great blind-faced, stately house was his own, that he could tramp far over lands which were his heritage, unfed though they might be, and that the very rustics who would pass him in the lanes were, so to speak, his own people:  that he had name, life, even the common thing of hunger for his morning food—­it was all of use.

An alluring picture—­of a certain deep, clear bathing pool in the park rose before him.  It had not called to him for many a day, and now he saw its dark blueness gleam between flags and green rushes in its encircling thickness of shrubs and trees.

He sprang from his bed, and in a few minutes was striding across the grass of the park, his towels over his arm, his head thrown back as he drank in the freshness of the morning-scented air.  It was scented with dew and grass and the breath of waking trees and growing things; early twitters and thrills were to be heard here and there, insisting on morning joyfulness; rabbits frisked about among the fine-grassed hummocks of their warren and, as he passed, scuttled back into their holes, with a whisking of short white tails, at which