passed him on its way. Faithful to all traditions of himself, James, the stableman, drove furiously. Wilfrid stood close to the hedge as the trap swept by and a thickness came back into his throat again as he thought of what it meant. That was their last early morning together. They would never be allowed to go out again. Besides which Dicky, was dead.

He did not really believe that. He could not believe it. Boys did not die like that. Death came to a man when he was very oldwhen he was forty at least. He had never heard of a boy dyingnot when he was strong and jolly like Dicky was. No he never believed that Dicky could be dead.

Yet he walked straight into his sister's bed-room, heedless of her dressing, his mind still dazed, and—

"Dicky's dead," said he. "He died this morning."

And when Dorothy had looked at him and looked, without asking how or why, she sat down slowly on her bed and sobbed, with shaking shoulders.

CHAPTER III.

BUT Dicky was not dead. At no little distance he had seen
Death, and in this life that is an experience one may well be thankful

for.

When Mr. Furlong saw his son lying on the bed to which Mrs. Furlong had carried him-her own bed, for a mother will trust no other his lips whitened and he said that something must be done at once.

"Yes-and what?" said she. the doctor?”

"How long will James be gone for

He looked at his watch though she had never asked for the calculated answer. She needed only that he should say, and at once, any time within reason that came into his head, so long as it gave her hope.

'Probably twenty-five minutes," said Mr. Furlong, putting his watch away. "If he doesn't find the doctor at once perhaps

thirty."

"And what can we do till then? Something must be done! You see he's only just breathing."

"Of course brandy's a good thing," said Mr. Furlong and the sickness at his heart made his tongue dry in his mouth-"Brandyas much of it as we could force him to take. The alcohol neutralises the effect of the poison. Brandy's the thing."

"But there's none in the house!" she cried.

"I know," said he.

"Nor whisky either!"

"I know," he repeated, and he tried to think of other remedies he knew. Before he could suggest anything else she had left the room. When he found himself alone, he knelt down by the side of

the bed and took Dicky's hand, then-as most men of a religious nature are being that strange mixture of sentiment and hardness, practical in all common-place matters of life, lacking in initiative when the moment is crucial, the tears came hot into his eyes and he bent his head in prayer.

"Oh, God," he murmured, just loud enough to hear his own voice-"Oh, God-if I have deserved that my son be taken from me, give me strength that I may bear the pain of Thy justice"which, being phrased in the true spirit of the Church, was doubtless beautiful in its humility, but did no good to Dicky on the bed.

He was still upon his knees when Mrs. Furlong returned. She saw that he was praying but, with that marvellous versatility of a woman, seemed in complete sympathy with him while her heart was beating with impatience. Before he had raised his head from his hands, she was forcing some liquid from a bottle between Dicky's lips.

"What's that you're giving him?" he asked as he looked up. "Eau de Cologne," said she.

"But Christina "-he rose to his feet.

"I've heard of people getting drunk on Eau de Cologne," she replied.

"Of course there is a percentage of alcohol in it," said he. "It can't do any harm."

Seemingly it had done good, for Dicky's eyes opened.

'Mother," he whispered and found her close against his heart. Mr. Furlong put out his hand; but it was only a moment of consciousness. Dicky had slipped back again into that world between life and death of which the wisest of us know nothing. Only one moment of consciousness, and that moment Dicky had given to his mother.

"I'll go and see if the doctor's coming," said Mr. Furlong. As he went downstairs it was more he knew the pain of being ignored than that he felt it.

As soon as the door had closed, Mrs. Furlong began to make Dicky ready for her bed. Upon that very bed in agony of body she had brought him into the world; now in agony of mind she laid him there to rest, slipping off one garment after another with that care and dexterity which, with a woman, is more wonderful than sleight-of-hand. His coat, his his knickerbockers, his shirt, his stockings, one by one she laid them aside, scarcely stirring him as she took them off. At last he lay in a clean night-shirt alone in the big bed and, as she bent over him, one drop from her eyes splashed fair upon his cheek.

At the sound of the doctor's footsteps on the stairs, she quickly wiped it away.

"Well-what's this?" inquired the doctor cheerfully as he

entered.

She shook hands with him hurriedly and pointed to the bed. One moment's examination of Dicky and he stood up.

"A basin of hot water," said he shortly-"a tumbler-tooth glass-anything-a towel. If you go downstairs I'll let you know presently, Mrs. Furlong."

"I'll stay," she replied.

He shrugged his shoulders, but in three minutes was glad of her. She did not flinch, even when holding Dicky's hand for the work of his lancet. In acute pain of mind Mr. Furlong looked on. At the first incision Dicky's eyes opened again; at the second he kicked violently and then again he moaned.

"I must do one more,'
" he heard the doctor say.

"You shan't!" he shouted.

"Very well-I won't," said the doctor when it was done, and Mrs. Furlong smiled for one instant into his eyes.

'Now," said he, "we'll let him rest a bit. You'd better come downstairs."

Mr. Furlong was obedient, but his wife pointed to a chair in a far corner of the room.

"He won't know I'm there," she whispered, "and I can let you know."

They left her there, and there for an hour she watched Dicky's face. Not a movement of his eyelids escaped her. At last he dropped asleep.

Destiny has the whole gamut of the laws of Nature at its command wherewith to mould the creatures of its choice.

It was that early morning in Autumn when Destiny first began its work with Dicky Furlong.

From that day he was to be a different being, was to enter upon the second phase of his making, the second of the many through which he must pass before he could become that Richard Furlong whose name the world knows now and will remember when many another is forgotten.

CHAPTER IV.

THERE were three long weeks in that large bed for Dicky before he might see the fields again or feel the touch of the grass beneath his feet. From his bedroom window only the sky was visible with just one break the plume of a high poplar which nearly reached the window catch. So then, whenever he was alone, he watched the sky-the sky at early morning growing into the brilliance of day— the sky in all its fulness of light fading through a thousand colours into evening.

Always his mother sat with him in the afternoon, till the light was feeble and the high tea at six o'clock was served downstairs. Sometimes she would read to him, more often sew, while he lay

there in silence and, though he never expressed it in words, when at the finish of her work, she collected all her coloured silks and laid them in her basket, yet he thought how like the coming of the evening that was a tired woman laying aside her coloured silks until the daylight came again. There was one large ball of orange at which, once, when she was putting it away in her basket, he had said aloud

"There goes the sun."

Mrs Furlong looked up.

"The sun, Dicky? It set long ago.'

"The ball of silk," said he.

She took it out and smiled.

"It is like the sun-isn't it?" and then she laid it back again. She had never known of all he meant by that. Had he even known it himself? In those years Dicky's mind was being fed with food he never tasted. The clouds-a legion-which passed across the heavens every day before his eyes made but little conscious impression upon his mind. He merely lay and watched them. Sometimes they took shapes which filled his mind with stories. He saw wild beasts with jaws wide open which crawled the sky at evening. He saw Spain's great Armada, with sails full-bellied, come riding up the azure of the Spanish Main. He saw volcanoes on a far horizon, belching forth their mountain columns of smoke, which, when once lifted, hung in suspense like the vast canvas of some monstrous tent. He saw those fleets of little ships which face alone the length and breadth of all the endless blue. there were days when not a ship was on the sea, and often then, with eyes that closed to the intensity of light, Dicky would fall asleep.

And

There was other food for Dicky's mind as well as this. For the first time in his life, he became the possessor of a real secret. There had always closed for him a mystery around his father and mother. It was not often that he was worried by it, but there were times when he wondered about his father's childhood, how his father had treated him, whether he had done the things that Dicky wanted to do and if he had done them, then what had happened. But of all his life before he had taken the mill, that is, of all his life one year before Dicky had been born, Mr. Furlong was strangely silent. Dicky was not so curious about his mother's youth, but even she never alluded to it and, though he was not so old as that he might find it strange, yet questions had often risen to his thoughts, but he had never asked them.

One day when there were no ships on the sea, when the sky had no tales to tell him, he found himself looking long at his mother, who sat sewing in the window. He wondered how she could ever have been young; he wondered, too, if she could ever be old. And then he wondered if any of the boys in Mr. Leggatt's school at

vols

of s

Eckington had mothers as beautiful as she.
all, one after another. There were none.
match her.

He went through them Not one of them could

"Mother," he said presently, not taking his eyes from her face— "how old are you?"

For a moment she went on in silence with her sewing, a smile twitching the corner of her lips. At last she looked up.

"Why, Dicky? Why do you ask?"

"Because," said he, "if I'm ten, mustn't you be very old? I mean, you must be thirty, mustn't you?"

"Yes-and more," said she.

"And how old's father?"

"I don't think your father would like me to tell you his age, Dicky."

Why not?"

"Well-I don't really know why. Anne asked him once and he said she must not be curious. Do you remember asking him how much money he made out of the mill?"

Dicky remembered well. He had been comparing the penny-aweek which he received in pocket money with the twopence-a-week which one of the boys got at Leggatt's school. It was a matter seeming to him to depend entirely upon how much his father made out of the mill.

'That's just what he said to me," said Dicky; "he told me not to be curious."

With a wonderful discretion, Mrs. Furlong went on with her sewing. Dicky knew he was not to be answered, yet no information had emphatically been denied him. Nevertheless, he was disappointed and turned his face to the other wall. There he lay for some minutes counting the roses on the wall-paper, plucking them and tying them into bunches to give to his mother.

Presently he turned again.

"Where did you live before you came to the mill?

" he asked.

"At a place called Wittingham, in Buckinghamshire."

"Was it as big as Eckington?"

'Oh—it wasn't a village," said she; "that was the name of the house."

"Did it belong to you?"

"No."

"Who did it belong to?"

"It belonged to Lord Wittingham."

"Was he your father?"

She laughed.

"No, my father was only a barrister, Dicky-just plain Mr. Tennant that's all."

"Then why did you live in Lord Wittingham's house?"

She did not reply at once and her needle made the stitches just a little quicker.