A wonderfully fascinating study, and yet at times it left him unspeakably weary and depressed, for what did all this knowledge avail without the practical means to apply it? The great machines that the ancients had built, what were they now but masses of red rust, useless alike to the fool who laughed at them and to the visionary who could only dream of their magnificent potentialities. A dream, for, in truth, a lion was in the way. So long as the Doomsmen held sway in the land, so long must the wheels of progress stay locked. Unable to use themselves the treasures of knowledge stored under their hands, they were unwilling that another should even touch them. What could he or any other one man do? Once, indeed, during the three years, Constans had found brief opportunity to revisit the scenes of his old home in the valley of the Swiftwater. In this general district of the West Inch were to be found nearly all of the larger estates, a fitting cradling-place, it would seem, for the new liberty, the awakening era. But time was not yet come, as Constans soon saw clearly. He had been hospitably enough received, for the country-side had not forgotten the story of the Greenwood Keep, and it was plain to see that this clear-eyed, well-set-up lad was of the true Stockader breed. One of his father's bond-friends, Piers Major, of the River Barony, had even offered Constans a home under his roof-tree in exchange for sword-service. But this he declined, with becoming gratitude indeed, but none the less firmly. He had no fancy to spend the rest of his life in a trooper's saddle riding down naked savages--an agreeable occupation, whose only variation was an afternoon at pig-sticking or a chance crack at some Doomsman's head. Better to endure the drudgery of the tan-pits than to part with all purpose in life. And so the crusade, which Constans had hoped to father, died at its birth. The kinsmen and friends of his family were sincere enough in their sympathy, but they could not be expected to risk their own skins in the furtherance of his private quarrels, and, so far as it was a question of political economy or of patriotism, these easy-going gentlemen troubled themselves not one whit. For the most part the Doomsmen kept their distance from a Stockader's threshold, and _laissez-faire_ was a good motto for both sides to adopt. Constans returned to Croye and to Messer Hugolin's attic neither overmuch surprised nor discouraged by the results of his mission. After all, his ultimate object was a personal one--his revenge--and only his own hand could discharge that debt in full. Did the time seem over-long, the way unendurably lonely and toilsome? He had only to close his eyes to remember--to remember. And so the years had passed. * * * * *