It was something very different for which he had to prepare himself now. As he walked towards home he suddenly came in sight, as he turned the village corner into the high road, of a pair who were walking on before him from the station. Paul’s heart gave a sudden leap in his breast, but not with joy. He stood still for a moment, then went on, making no effort to overtake them. A man and a woman plodding along the dusty road: he with the long strides and clumsy gait of one who was quite destitute of that physical training which gives to the upper classes so much of their superiority, his arms swinging loosely from his shoulders; she encumbered with the skirt of her dress, which trailed along the dusty road. The sun was high by this time, and very warm, and they felt it. Paul did not take his eyes from them as they went along, but he made no effort to make up to them. This was what he had played with in the time of his folly--what he thought he had chosen, without ever choosing it. What could he do, what could he do, he cried out in his heart with the vehemence of despair, to be clear of it now? Spears had come to settle his accounts with Paul. In the course of the negotiation which had gone so far, which had gone indeed as far as anything could go not to be settled and concluded, he had received money from the young man for his share of the emigration capital. That Paul, when he separated himself from the party meant to leave this with them as a help to them, there was no doubt; and this was one reason why he had avoided meeting with his old associates, or ending formally the connection between them. And when Spears demanded that a place of meeting should be appointed, Paul had with reluctance decided upon Markham as a half-way house, where he would have the help of his mother to smooth down and mollify the demagogue. Spears had been deeply compunctious for the part he had taken against Paul in London, but was also deeply wounded by Paul’s refusal to accept his self-humiliation; and his object in seeking him now was not, as Paul thought, to reproach him for his desertion, nor was it to call him to account on the subject of Janet. Paul himself was not sufficiently generous, not noble enough to understand the proud and upright character of the humble agitator, who carried the heart of a prince under his working man’s clothes, and to whom it was always more easy to give than to take. Spears was coming with a very different purpose. With the greatest trouble and struggle he had managed to reclaim, and separate from the other money collected, the sum paid by Paul. It had been not only a wonderful blow to his personal pride and his affections, but it diminished greatly his importance among his fellows when it was discovered that the young aristocrat, of whose adhesion they were inconsistently proud, was no longer under the influence or at the command of Spears; and it had cost him not only a