"John refuses to be helped simply because he thinks so much of us--he's not going to jeopardise his friendship by indebtedness or reasonable gratitude. But you men never can see these things. Only a woman understands." "Rot!" said Vernley, but he began to understand. That night he wrote to Marsh. "I shouldn't mention it any more, Scissors can't be shaken--the Governor's failed, and if your Governor tried he might suspect a plot and throw us all over. Perhaps we'll have a chance later. School teaching's a hell of a life." True to his advice, Marsh dropped his own scheme, in which his father had concurred. When John arrived to spend September at the Vicarage the choice John had made was not opposed. They had a jolly holiday, jolly in so far as John, with the momentous events of the last two months in his mind, could be light-hearted. Often he looked into the future and sometimes was seized by despair at its hopelessness. It was not the task confronting him. Earning a living was the common lot of men, and the one in which they found most happiness. It was his loneliness, the apparent futility of his life. He was alone. That was the awful thought. This great, passionate world, and of all its millions, not one inseparably bound to him, to rise or fall with his success or failure! Ungenerous, perhaps, this thought. He had friends, such friends too! But the possession of friendship meant independence; he was not going to be behind and be pulled along in the race of life. They should have no cause to be sorry for him; rather would he have them eager to know him, to cherish his friendship the more for the success that he brought with it. He was of a class that found it easier to do a favour than receive one. He spent his life seeking, not a way out, but a way through. He was now braced for the contest, and the sternness of it exhilarated him with the freshness of a morning sea. He was diving from a great height of sunlit friendship into the cold sea of life. CHAPTER III I