"Cheerful!" Cummings echoed the word with a deep breath. It struck him for the first time that he took too many things in this world for granted, that there were indeed a hundred and one good times in such a life as his which he failed to appreciate fully. He had imagination; he could enter into the lonely boy’s revolt at the betrayal of his childhood, his indignation at the grey life Glune demanded, alike tributes to its power. Memories of his own pleasant childhood came back to him in vivid contrast, recalling its sunshine and glow: competition and excitement, friendly rivalries in work and play; small sacrifices for sport that brought their own reward; his father’s pride in him, his mother’s love, their rooted—if delightfully absurd—conviction that he was bound to excel in anything he undertook, his personal ardour and ambition, the thrill of success.... He turned impulsively. "There must be something to do? Surely one could do something?" Brand laughed again. "It’s hardly your business, is it?" he asked in a calm philosophical tone that shamed the young man’s enthusiasm into silence. "Besides, it would be interference in what parsons tell us is the great scheme." The boy winced. His father had come into the family living as a matter of course; a genial atmosphere of piety had sweetened the limited disappointments of Cummings’ youth. "That bugbear of religion," Brand went on, "what atrocities are committed in its name! ’God made all men equal.’ What a lie! Some men are born to go under. In the fight for mere existence no allowance is made for frailty. Unless a man can keep up with his fellows, he must drop out of life’s race. Some of us are doomed at the outset, fashioned and shaped and moulded in God’s image, only to be ground down to powder by the great Juggernaut of circumstance, like that beetle under your heel." He pointed contemptuously to the road. "The days of miracles are passed, if they ever existed. Unless Richard Farquharson gets away from his surroundings, he will never have a chance in life. Stunted in mind and doubtless in growth, half starved, friendless, and unloved, pent up all day with a mad mother and an old woman of seventy—what can he do? It wasn’t only in the much abused Herod’s time that innocents were massacred. Take the police records of to-day.... No! don’t, they’re ugly reading." He stopped again. "Richard Farquharson’s next-of-kin is now at Oxford. He has a father who moves with the times. He’ll get on. The patriots of old bought titles with their blood, but gold is cheaper. This man wiped off one of a prince’s debts, and got a knighthood for the privilege." "Look," said Cummings suddenly. The two men stopped near the summit of a heather-covered spur, overlooking the castle. Cummings took a few steps forward, mounting to the crest, and then with that instinctive reverence, which one must be very young or very pure instantly to respond to, raised his cap.