and the yellow tongue below it ceased to whimper. Then Tempest spoke, half-nervously.
"I have heard a good deal about you, Dick," he said.
"Ah?" Dick's tone was lightly cynical. "We are not boys any more. You have heard that, I suppose?"
"Why—I can't exactly say that I've heard you've grown a man," said Tempest; and then Dick faced round on him with drawn lips and eyes alight.
"No?" he said, with a soft bitterness that stung the other. "And yet I fancy I did all a man could do before"
The little down-slide of the hand told the rest. Tempest spoke sharply.
"A man has never done all he can do till he's dead," he said.
Physically Dick knew that. The men of his kind had proved it with their bodies often enough. But he had stultified his beliefs, and he did not want them roused.
"Oh, my dear fellow; that is as illogical as the rest of our professions. We preach the divine right of free-will, and we spend ourselves in crippling it. We build reformatories and prisons where the fruit of sin may rot because our convictions are not strong enough to allow us to root out the tree. We palter with what we are pleased to call our beliefs because we know that not one of them will stand a direct pull. We recognise that eternally the dog will return to his vomit and the prodigal son to his husks, and yet our civilisation gravely asserts that he would sooner be good. He wouldn't sooner be anything of the kind. Why should he? Inasmuch as man is an individual he possesses individual rights. I recognise that, and yet I earn my living by enforcing the contrary. The whole system of mankind is a pose—an illogical pose, and it is only the divine humour of things which enables us to take it seriously."
"Seriously! My God!" Tempest turned on him with blazing eyes. "You can see life as we of the police see it, and yet talk like that! You know that up through the whole chaos of the world's history certain ethical rights have been evolving, slowly and painfully, with the actual
