had looked on them as the buried foundation-stones of all reasoning. So that Kingston fell between two stools, and must needs keep company with his ideas until the passing of time should bring him level with the contemporaries over whom his training had given him such an unhealthy and fictitious advantage. In any case it is hardly likely that he could ever have taken any really intimate part in Oxford life. Training or no training, his mind had that inquiring tone so fatal to unreflecting hilarity. He was too much interested--in the wrong things, too, and in the wrong way--in people, in causes, in problems. The men who should have been his friends were concerned almost entirely with the joy of living and the avoidance of all unnecessary work. And how is the son of a widow, reared at home decorously, without other boys to riot and tumble with--how is he to have any personal enthusiasm for the joy of living, as understood by healthier, normal men of his own age? Nor is the precocious cleverness of the unquiet mind any real test of ability. Few of Kingston Darnley’s contemporaries but had as good an intelligence as his. Their brains, however, developed naturally along the natural path. In twenty years he had lived hurriedly through five-and-twenty of feverish mental development; their five-and-twentieth year--of mind no less than of body--still lay well ahead of them. By the time he and they would be thirty they might all, perhaps, be contemporaries together. The unhealthy, straggling shoots of his forced growth would have been blighted down to a level with theirs, sturdy and natural; and by the time they came to consider the game-laws and the gospels, they would bring a ripe and genial intelligence to bear on such points, neither thinking nor talking in excess, but letting profitless points of doctrine slide, for the sake of hitting on a sane and decent scheme of living, such as can best be attained by the average sensible gentleman’s compromise between abstract justice and sound, everyday behaviour. And Kingston himself would find, in the course of years, that the rubs and jars of life would bring his point of view to the same pitch as theirs, and would perceive that thought is a frivolous and profitless indulgence of the idle mind, as compared with the more fruitful achievement of an honest man’s daily duty, along the lines of obvious, rough-cast morality. Meanwhile, however, though without conscious arrogance, he realized his isolation, and viewed it alternately with pride and regret. On the whole, as self-satisfaction is the postulate of all human life, the pride predominated, and he carried unconsciously through Oxford the idea of being a chosen candlestick for spiritual light.