shall pay me five per cent interest, but no share of the

profits."
On these terms we dissolved the partnership and in a year they

had lost the ?00,000, for the slump came with a vengeance. It
saved them, however, and to-day they are earning a reasonable

income. But I have never asked them for that ?00,000.
Chapter II

Bastin and Bickley
Behold me once more a man without an occupation, but now the

possessor of about ?00,000. It was a very considerable fortune,
if not a large one in England; nothing like the millions of which

I had dreamed, but still enough. To make the most of it and to
be sure that it remained, I invested it very well, mostly in

large mortgages at four per cent which, if the security is good,
do not depreciate in capital value. Never again did I touch a

single speculative stock, who desired to think no more about
money. It was at this time that I bought the Fulcombe property.

It cost me about ?20,000 of my capital, or with alterations,
repairs, etc., say ?50,000, on which sum it may pay a net two

and a half per cent, not more.
This ?,700 odd I have always devoted to the upkeep of the

place, which is therefore in first-rate order. The rest I live
on, or save.

These arrangements, with the beautifying and furnishing of the
house and the restoration of the church in memory of my father,

occupied and amused me for a year or so, but when they were
finished time began to hang heavy on my hands. What was the use

of possessing about ?0,000 a year when there was nothing upon
which it could be spent? For after all my own wants were few and

simple and the acquisition of valuable pictures and costly
furniture is limited by space. Oh! in my small way I was like

the weary King Ecclesiast. For I too made me great works and had
possessions of great and small cattle (I tried farming and lost

money over it!) and gathered me silver and gold and the peculiar
treasure of kings, which I presume means whatever a man in

authority chiefly desires, and so forth. But "behold all was
vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the

sun."
So, notwithstanding my wealth and health and the deference

which is the rich man's portion, especially when the limit of his
riches is not known, it came about that I too "hated life," and

this when I was not much over thirty. I did not know what to do;
for Society as the word is generally understood, I had no taste;

it bored me; horse-racing and cards I loathed, who had already
gambled too much on a big scale. The killing of creatures under

the name of sport palled upon me, indeed I began to doubt if it
were right, while the office of a junior county magistrate in a

place where there was no crime, only occupied me an hour or two a
month.

Lastly my neighbours were few and with all due deference to
them, extremely dull. At least I could not understand them

because in them there did not seem to be anything to understand,
and I am quite certain that they did not understand me. More,

when they came to learn that I was radical in my views and had
written certain "dreadful" and somewhat socialistic books in the

form of fiction, they both feared and mistrusted me as an enemy
to their particular section of the race. As I had not married and

showed no inclination to do so, their womenkind also, out of
their intimate knowledge, proclaimed that I led an immoral life,

though a little reflection would have shown them that there was
no one in the neighbourhood which for a time I seldom left, who

could possibly have tempted an educated creature to such courses.
Terrible is the lot of a man who, while still young and

possessing the intellect necessary to achievement, is deprived of
all ambition. And I had none at all. I did not even wish to

purchase a peerage or a baronetcy in this fashion or in that,
and, as in my father's case, my tastes were so many and so

catholic that I could not lose myself in any one of them. They
never became more than diversions to me. A hobby is only really

amusing when it becomes an obsession.
At length my lonesomefriendliness oppressed me so much that I

took steps to mitigate it. In my college life I had two
particular friends whom I think I must have selected because they

were so absolutely different from myself.
They were named Bastin and Bickley. Bastin--Basil was his

Christian name--was an uncouth, shock-headed, flat-footed person
of large, rugged frame and equallyruggedhonesty, with a mind

almost incredibly simple. Nothing surprised him because he lacked
the faculty of surprise. He was like that kind of fish which lies

at the bottom of the sea and takes every kind of food into its
great maw without distinguishing its flavour. Metaphorically

speaking, heavenly manna and decayed cabbage were just the same
to Bastin. He was not fastidious and both were mental pabulum--of

a sort--together with whatever lay between these extremes. Yet he
was good, so painfully good that one felt that without exertion

to himself he had booked a first-class ticket straight to Heaven;
indeed that his guardian angel had tied it round his neck at

birth lest he should lose it, already numbered and dated like an
identification disc.

I am bound to add that Bastin never went wrong because he never
felt the slightest temptation to do so. This I suppose

constitutes real virtue, since, in view of certain Bible sayings,
the person who is tempted and would like to yield to the

temptation, is equally a sinner with the person who does yield.
To be truly good one should be too good to be tempted, or too

weak to make the effort worth the tempter's while--in short not
deserving of his powder and shot.

I need hardly add that Bastin went into the Church; indeed, he
could not have gone anywhere else; it absorbed him naturally, as

doubtless Heaven will do in due course. Only I think it likely
that until they get to know him he will bore the angels so much

that they will continually move him up higher. Also if they have
any susceptibilities left, probably he will tread upon their

toes--an art in which I never knew his equal. However, I always
loved Bastin, perhaps because no one else did, a fact of which he

remained totallyunconscious, or perhaps because of his brutal
way of telling one what he conceived to be the truth, which, as

he had less imagination than a dormouse, generally it was not.
For if the truth is a jewel, it is one coloured and veiled by

many different lights and atmospheres.
It only remains to add that he was learned in his theological

fashion and that among his further peculiarities were the slow,
monotonous voice in which he uttered his views in long sentences,

and his total indifference to adverseargument however sound and
convincing.

My other friend, Bickley, was a person of a quite different
character. Like Bastin, he was learned, but his tendencies faced

another way. If Bastin's omnivorous throat could swallow a camel,
especially a theological camel, Bickley's would strain at the

smallest gnat, especially a theological gnat. The very best and
most upright of men, yet he believed in nothing that he could not

taste, see or handle. He was convinced, for instance, that man is
a brute-descended accident and no more, that what we call the

soul or the mind is produced by a certain action of the grey
matter of the brain; that everything apparentlyinexplicable has

a perfectly mundane explanation, if only one could find it; that
miracles certainly never did happen, and never will; that all

religions are the fruit of human hopes and fears and the most
convincing proof of human weakness; that notwithstanding our

infinite variations we are the subjects of Nature's single law
and the victims of blind, black and brutal chance.

Such was Bickley with his clever, well-cut face that always
reminded me of a cameo, and thoughtful brow; his strong, capable

hands and his rather steely mouth, the mere set of which
suggested controversy of an uncompromising kind. Naturally as the