The next afternoon Vernley and John harnessed the pony and were on their way to the station to meet Muriel. Spring was in the air. The hedgerows were beginning to burst into leaf, and the birds singing in the lanes filled the country-side with hope. John's heart too was singing. It was so good to be driving through the sunlit lanes with a crisp air blowing in their faces, the friendly jog-trot of the pony beating upon their ears. He looked at Vernley, the imperturbable Vernley, who was flicking the pony's haunches with his whip. There was something comfortably solid about him. He represented tradition and the continuance of a settled conception of life. John had no difficulty in planning Vernley's future; unlike his own, it depended upon no caprice of Fate. He would go up to Oxford, travel, and then settle down to the life of a country gentleman. He would grow stout and red-cheeked, marry a healthy, unimaginative wife and be the father of a crowd of noisy, well-developed children. The hunt, a seat on the bench, June in London and August on the moors--that would be Vernley's life. And he would not bother his head about political or religious faiths. He would probably be a Conservative, despite his father, who was a family renegade, and a Churchman. Conservative, because caution and security were better than haste and revolution, and the world on the whole was a jolly old place despite Socialists and other disgruntled reformers. A Churchman, because he knew so little about religion, and a respectable ready-made creed, tried and found suitable as an accommodating policy of living was the safest and easiest to adopt. Had he been born in Constantinople he would have been a Mohammedan, in Bombay a Buddhist, in Hongkong a Confucian, and in Paris a Catholic. And whichever creed environment had caused him to accept, he would have been a credit to it, faithfully observing its tenets, a respectable, unthinking, clean-living fellow. Vernley looked at John as the station came into sight; the far-away expression was in his face, a curious detachment that often puzzled Vernley. Sometimes John seemed to have left his body in another world. It was uncanny and he remembered that Marsh, referring to this habit, had called it "the Eastern touch," though what that quite meant Vernley did not know. "The train's signalled," said Vernley. "We shall just get there in time. I wonder whether Muriel is bringing her friend back, she said she might--a topping girl." "I hope not--I don't want any one monopolising Muriel," said John boldly. "That's all right--I shall look after her friend--so don't you worry." They pulled up just as the train ran into the station. Vernley sat still in the trap. "I must mind the pony,--you go in, Scissors!"